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

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" The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional. "

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer. "

" So many of the things I talk about in 'Reality Hunger' seem to be the things that 'The Thing About Life' does - things like risk, contradiction, compression, mixing modes of attack from the memoristic gesture to data-crunching. "

" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "

" If the bus driver is black, I thank him... when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white. "

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

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

" One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time. "

" Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any. "

" I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own. "

" In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away. "

" Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic. "

" To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "

" I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom. "

" I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty. "

" Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face. "

" Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. "

" 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. "

" Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer. "

" 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. "

" The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. "

" I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker. "

" Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating. "

" I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. "

" When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise. "