But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

If you're writing fiction, you're dealing with characters who, themselves, will have heartfelt sentiments but who, themselves, live in this culture right now and thus face all the impediments to sort of dealing with those parts of their lives that, you know, that we did. So it would be not only silly but unrealistic to have a character saying that kind of stuff.

Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se.

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.