There were only one or two interviews that I actually really enjoyed in this book. I don’t think I’d really recommend this book.

Highlights

  • “… managing to really be an alive human being, and also to do good work and be as obsessive as you have to be, is really tricky.” [p 14]
  • “You can either learn by aligning yourself with the sort of company line at a program or you can play James Dean and align yourself against it. Sometimes it’s not until you have professors — you know, authority figures — kicking your ass, and you still find yourself resisting what they’re saying that you find out what you believe.” [p 15]
  • “M.F.A. factories” [p 15]
  • “What would you like your writing to do? … act as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way with, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world.” [p 16]
  • “… every two or three generations the world gets vastly different, and the context in which you have to learn how to be a human being, or to have good relationships, or decide whether or not there is a God, or decide whether there’s such a thing as love, and whether it’s redemptive, become vastly different.” [p 18]
  • “… living now is that everything presents itself as familiar, so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it’s strange.” [p 19]
  • “…comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” [p 21]
  • “… TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art — which just means art whose primary aim is to make money — is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain.” [p 22]
  • “… compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem.” [p 23]
  • “… I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just that art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one of the consequences is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being liked, so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, … she has given all her power away to them.” [p 25]
  • “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” [p 26]
  • “…another commodity… features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible.” (Larry McCaffery) [p 29]
  • “…commodification… inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by-acceptance.” [p 31]
  • “You’re at once allowing the reader to sort of escape self by achieving some sort of identification with another human pysche — the writer’s, or some character’s, etc. — and you’re also trying to antagonize the reader’s intuition that she is a self, that she is alone and going to die alone…This makes serious fiction a rough and bumpy affair for everyone involved. Commericial entertainment, on the other hand, smooths everything over.” [p 32-33]
  • “…"the click of a well-made box"” [p 35]
  • “I don’t know whether I have much natural talent going for me fiction-wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there’s a click.” [p 35]
  • “…the reader’s own life "outside" the story changes the story.” [p 40]
  • “…metafiction…helps reveal fiction as a mediated experience.” [p 40]
  • “If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there’s nothing "outside" language for language to have to picture or refer to.” [p 41]
  • “… the fundamental problem with language is, quote, "I don’t know my way about."” [p 41]
  • “Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion.” [p 45]
  • “Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes it the subject of the text. Minimalism’s even worse, emptier, because it’s a fraud: it eschews not only the self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there is no narrative consciousness in its text.” [p 45]
  • “The founder of a movement is never part of the movement.” [p 46]
  • “Now here come the crank-turners.” [p 46]
  • “…how poisonous postmodern irony’s become… Sarcasm, parody, absurdism, and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show’ the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules for art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do?… All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff.” [p 48]
  • “Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.” [p 49]
  • “… irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.” [p 49]
  • “The click’s idiosyncratic, personal” [p 49]
  • “You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.” [p 49]
  • “… give the reader something. The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.” [p 50]
  • “…less ego-driven” [p 51]
  • “commercial-escapism” [p 56]
  • “…figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine.” [p 61]
  • “emotional poverty” [p 68]
  • Infinite Jest unerringly pinpoints how Americans have turned the pursuit of pleasure into an addiction.” [p 69]
  • “I’m a typical American. Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.” [p 69]
  • “There is The Thing, plunked down in the coliseum of our consciousness. There is The Viewer of this Thing, sitting in the stands, hand on chin. And there is The Viewer of The Viewer of The Thing — the postmodernist meta-physician hovering in the helicopter above, discussing the way people watch. And then, somewhere out in the cosmos, watching the watcher watch himself watching, talking about talking about talking, there is David Foster Wallace…” (Matthew Gilber) [p 76]
  • “The particular kind of irony I’m talking about [is] when Letterman comes out and says, ‘What a fine crowd’” [p 80]
  • “… every form of pleasure or desire, from sports and TV to human relationships, threatens to turn into a need…” [p 90]
  • “I think that in a country where we have it as easy as we do, one of our big dread vectors is boredom.” [p 128]
  • “But also, of course, now that we’re putatively grown up there’s also a lot of really, really interesting stuff and sometimes you sit in quiet rooms and do a lot of drudgery and at the end of it is a surprise or something very rewarding or a feeling of fulfillment.” [p 129]
  • “I’m not a particular Luddite. I’m not particularly opposed to media. I just think it’s weird that we don’t often talk or think about the agenda behind a lot of this stuff.” [p 140]
  • “I want to do stuff that feels real to me, and so stuff that’s been very heavily used in commerical entertainments, that are very neat and slick and sophisticated are probably going to strike me as not real, and I’m going to avoid them.” [p 145]
  • “… it’s very, very difficult to talk about a language within that language.” [p 147]
  • “… tummy-truth as opposed to head-truth” [p 148]
  • “… no real money or fame in serious culture here helps keep these vocations purer, cleaner… the mainstream neglect and lack of interest is ultimately a good thing — for the art, I mean.” [p 153]
  • “The more I like someone’s work, the less I want personal acquaintance to pollute my experience of reading her.” [p 156]
  • “… greasy thrill of fame” [p 174]
  • “Success can be as difficult to recover from as failure.” [p 176]
  • “… expectations are a very fine line. Up to a certain point they can be motivating… Past that point they’re toxic and paralying.” [p 176]