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" Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer. "

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" Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled. "

" I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books. "

" Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever. "

" During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial. "

" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "

Straightforward

" The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling. "

" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem. "

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" I'm a sucker for sports movies. "

" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "

" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "

" From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. "

" Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it. "

" I try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something 'true' and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature. "

" Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt. "

" It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's. "

" I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. "

" I'm really drawn toward work that is trying to capture what it's like to think now and to live now. "

" I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor. "

" Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form. "

" The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition. "

" New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. "

" Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market. "

" I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games. "

" I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother? "

" I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation. "

" In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward. "

" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "