Zitat des Tages von T. C. Boyle:
Sometimes if something is entertaining and amusing, people tend to think that it doesn't have the depth of something that's dramatic. I don't think that's true.
Sometimes, we find common ground; more often, we don't.
As humans, we all want our own island. Of course, the truth is, we're never going to get it.
I don't care if the audience is 600 Saul Bellows; I'm going to knock them dead with a comedy routine. I'm out there as a missionary for literature because, if people laugh and enjoy themselves, they might actually do something as bizarre as reading the book.
I describe myself as an environmentalist not because I'm marching in the street with placards but because I like to be in the woods by myself.
Look at Sam Beckett. Most depressed man who ever lived, but he sure was funny.
It's true that none of my characters are admirable. But maybe I'm primarily a satirist, and a satirist needs to hold up what's not admirable.
I think that's what art is about: to provoke you. It helps me make sense of a senseless universe because I become the god of the story. I create it, and I see it in all its lineaments in my own way and can control it - in a world in which everything else is out of control.
I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
If we lose sight of the fact that writing is entertainment, then writing is doomed.
This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.
Science has killed religion. There's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.
Now that we all live in a bad '70s sci-fi movie, I am made to understand the tyranny of the machines every minute of every day.
I've never really been met with indifference, where they say, 'Who cares?' I think that's what good art is supposed to do. It's not supposed to make you feel good about your own prejudices and your own values; it's supposed to open you up in some way and get you outraged or make you happy or make you sad or whatever it's going to do.
It's hard to say how certain stories just punch us in the heart and the brain at the same time at the end. I suppose that's what we're all looking for. But each story has its own valence, its own way of saying goodbye to you.
I envy Jesus because he's dead.
It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
One of the reasons I've been able to be productive is that I want to do everything.
You want, as an artist, to be pushing yourself to do what you haven't done before.
I do not want to repeat myself. I want to reach for something I've never attained. This is the excitement of art.
Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.
In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
