Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

The most hopeful thing in the stories, I hope, is wit. I make it up. If I make up a world in which we're ruled by big talking turds, it doesn't mean that we are. So you shouldn't feel depressed.

I live up in the hills, and I don't have any cable, and I have really slow satellite, so that does it - because being on the Internet is okay, but it takes a long time. I have a prediction that at some point, there will be a backlash. Like at the end of the '60s, there was that back-to-the-land movement, and I'm guessing that people will start consciously saying, "I'm not taking the phone with me," or "I'm only checking email x number of times a day," or "I'm not ever gonna self-Google," for example.

Now, we don't really believe these things - intellectually we know better - but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what's actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.

We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.

Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.