“Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance”

“It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

“Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) ”

“Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.”

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”

“Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.”

“When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.”