“If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world… Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

— David Foster Wallace, interview with Dalkey Archive Press (via trenchantashell)
Posted on November 18, 2011 at 5:59am with 115 notes and was reblogged from A Writer's Ruminations

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    As I lie on the library’s floor in defeat, I need to find someway to pick myself back up. To find the good in a...
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    infinite sadness
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