To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.