Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

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.

You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

There are secrets within secrets, though--always.