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" That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life. "

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" We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense. "

" Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown. "

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

" Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age. "

" 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? "

" You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life. "

" I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive. "

" 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 reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture. "

" I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form. "

" Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it. "

" Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. "

" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "

" 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. "

" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "

" A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. "

" What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011. "

" Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical. "

" I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense. "

" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "

" The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network. "

" I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said. "

" I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well. "

" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "

" I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller. "

" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "

" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "

Straightforward

" I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing. "

" It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people. "