There Comes That Phase In Life When,

I Believe That, When [meeting Of Writer And Reader] Happens And The Reader Goes Out Into The World The Next Day, There's Some Alteration That Might Possibly Inflect The Person Positively.

In My Personal And Spiritual Life, I Reject That. I Don't Believe In That. I'm Always Trying To Get My Mind Into A Less Judgmental Place, Making Less Rigid Judgments About Things Like "perverse" Versus "pure." But In Terms Of Prose, Those Sorts Of Oppositions Seem To Work.

You Don't Want To Spend Your Life Writing About Stuff That Doesn't Matter. You Want To Try To Pull Out Of The Temporal Mediocre And Write In A Way That Is Meaningful To Everybody. This Goes Back To This Idea Of Being Intimate With Your Reader. Since We're All Down Here And We're All Dying And Aspiring And Loving And Feeling Inadequate, All These Things That We All Are Doing All The Time, What A Relief It Is, When Somebody Looks At You And Says, "yeah, Me Too."

Realism Is To Fiction What Gravity Is To Walking: A Confinement That Allows Dancing Under The Right Circumstances.

Now I Began To Understand Art As A Kind Of Black Box The Reader Enters. He Enters In One State Of Mind And Exits In Another. The Writer Gets No Points Just Because What's Inside The Box Bears Some Linear Resemblance To "real Life" -- He Can Put Whatever He Wants In There. What's Important Is That Something Undeniable And Nontrivial Happens To The Reader Between Entry And Exit.