The Moms revealed that if you're not crazy then speaking to someone who isn't there is termed apostrophe and is valid art.

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though--and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

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.