We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.
People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.
The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.
My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound.
Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.
There's no need to inundate the world with books and language. It's just too full already. There's so much rubbish hiding in the world. But as long as I think I can do something inventive and insightful, then I'll keep doing it.
Some ways of naming a generation are fruitful and some are not. Postmodernism is not. It doesn't really say anything.
I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.
I see no reason to stop writing. But the reason isn't always one of your own. The mind is not invulnerable, and it can lose some of its powers.
What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary.
If you start thinking about the kids being born now, for them the computer is ancient history. So one imagines that when children think of it as the only place to be, because there isn't anywhere else, then the geniuses of those generations will find their way into doing something that is impressive and as good as a Shakespeare or a Cervantes. But nowadays, we can't see that. We're not close enough to it yet.
