"Raymond Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he's supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners."

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More quotes from: David Foster Wallace

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• "But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by ..."
• "But since your good opinion is the sole arbitrator of my success and worth, you ..."
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• "Even today, when people I don't know ask me what I do for a living, ..."
• "Fiction-writing's lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It's yourself you have to be estranged ..."
• "Fiction's about what it is to be a human being. "
• "For some reason I probably couldn't even explain, I've been convinced of this for years, ..."
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• "Here's a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see ..."
• "Here's an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it ..."
• "I 've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting ..."
• "I don't know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, ..."
• "I don't seem to be able to call myself a writer. And terms like "postmodernist" ..."
• "I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what ..."
• "I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who ..."
• "I guess I don't know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you're ..."
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• "I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to ..."
• "I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today ..."
• "I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this ..."
• "I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of ..."
• "I think it's impossible to spend that many slack-jawed, spittle-chinned, formative hours in front of ..."
• "I think right now it's important for art-fiction to antagonize the reader's sense that what ..."
• "I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people ..."
• "I think younger writers owe themselves a richer account of just why TV's become such ..."
• "I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent ..."
• "I'm always stumped when critics regard references to popular culture in serious fiction as some ..."
• "I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because the big R's ..."
• "I'm not saying I'm able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems ..."
• "Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. "
• "If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, ..."
• "If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it's probably Barth and ..."
• "If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can ..."
• "If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things ..."
• "In a mass mediated nation, it's no longer North vs. South. It's under-thirty vs. over ..."
• "In a way it's sad that Vollmann's integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it's ..."
• "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates ..."
• "In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you ..."
• "Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called ..."
• "Irony's useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now ..."
• "Is it essentially mimetic, to capture and order a protean reality? Or is it really ..."
• "Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling ..."
• "It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire ..."
• "It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. ..."
• "It might also be a part of why I end up doing anywhere from five ..."
• "It might just be that simple. "

• "It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and ..."
• "It seems to involve the idea that if writers care enough about their audience - ..."
• "It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called "the click of a ..."
• "It was standing in line to happen. And for a while, stuff like "Pale Fire" ..."
• "It's a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the ..."
• "It's a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now ..."
• "It's almost always deployed to make some point or to create an effect that's internal ..."
• "It's easy for older writers just to bitch about TV's hegemony over the U.S. art ..."
• "It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of ..."
• "It's literally aggravating: you awaken them to the fact that they've been unconsciously imbibing some ..."
• "It's often useful to dispense with standard formulas, of course, but it's just as often ..."
• "It's seldom acknowledged that viewers' relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. "
• "It's the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel ..."
• "It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I ..."
• "Look at utilitarianism - that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a ..."
• "Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ..."
• "Maybe our touchstone now should be G. M. Hopkins, who made up his "own" set ..."
• "Metafiction's real end has always been Armageddon. Art's reflection on itself is terminal, is one ..."
• "Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any ..."
• "Minimalism's just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem's still the one of ..."
• "My idea in "Westward" was to do with metafiction what Moore's poetry or like DeLillo's ..."
• "No question that some of the early postmodernists and ironists and anarchists and absurdists did ..."
• "Now the rap response is more like "You've always exploited us to get rich, so ..."
• "Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes. "
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• "On the one hand, there's sort of an embarrassment of riches for young writers now. ..."
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• "Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes ..."
• "One new context is to take something almost narcotizingly banal- it's hard to think of ..."
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• "One teacher called these moments "mathematical experiences." What I didn't know then was that a ..."
• "One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we ..."
• "People have been under some sort of metaphysical anesthesia, so you dismantle the metaphysics' axioms ..."
• "People who've been raised with U.S. commercial culture and are engaged with it and informed ..."
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• "Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just ..."
• "Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous ..."
• "Raymond Carver invented - or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway - the techniques ..."
• "Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find ..."
• "Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. "
• "Return with us now to Deare Olde Amherst. For most of my college career I ..."
• "Rock was and is all about busting loose, exceeding limits, and limits are usually set ..."
• "Showing the reader that you're smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be ..."
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• "Sure "A Clockwork Orange" is a self-consciously sick, nasty film about the sickness and nastiness ..."
• "Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like ..."
• "The "pretension." Twenty-five year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I ..."
• "The analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a ..."
• "The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops right into spectation. It ..."
• "The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and ..."
• "The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" and in parts ..."
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• "The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. "

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• "This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. "
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• "This was Wittgenstein's double bind: you can either treat language as an infinitely small dense ..."
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• "We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. "
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• "We've all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and ..."
• "We've seen that you can break any or all of the rules without getting laughed ..."
• "Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because ..."
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• "When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you're talking about real geniuses, the writers who ..."
• "Whether I can provide a payoff and communicate a function rather than just seem jumbled ..."
• "Who wouldn't love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer ..."
• "With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. "
• "Wittgenstein argues that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function ..."
• "You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, ..."
• "You could argue that it affects only "her reaction to the story" or "her take ..."
• "You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. ..."
• "You've got music here that both hates the white GOP values of the Reaganiod eighties ..."
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