I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.