“The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.”

“McKee's a genius. And hillarious. You'll like him, too, Charles. He's all for originality, just like you.He says that we have to realize that we all write in a genre and we must find our originality within that genre.As it turns out, there hasn't been a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary.My genre's thriller, what's yours? ”

“My favorite genre is Beautifully Written Books of Any Genre. Could we make that a genre?”

“This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.”

“The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.”

“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”