Quotes from Tom Bissell

Hocking was slender in the way that writers and musicians are sometimes slender: not out of any desire or design but rather because his days were spent being consumed rather than consuming.

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

The world, finally, is no longer large, and to ignore it likely requires more effort than to simply take notice.

This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades—and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong.

Had Dr. Seuss been a slightly insane pornographer, he might have written a book like this.--reviewing Nicholson Baker's House of Holes

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine.

Many shooters ask the gamer to use violence against pure, unambiguous evil: monsters, Nazis, corporate goons, aliens of Ottoman territorial ambition. Yet these shooters typically have nothing to say about evil and violence, other than that evil is evil and violence is violent. This was never the most promising thematic carbon to trace, and yet shooters keep doing so with as little self-questioning as a medieval monk copying out scripture.

There are not many mediums whose Dantes and Homers one can ring up and talk to. With games, one can.

The impulse to explain is the Achilles' heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.

When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent

The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.

I have an immensely understanding partner who does something creative herself, and we both need a lot of time alone. I structure my life around getting my work done, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. That's the only way I've been able to do it.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game.

When a game does this well, you lose track of your manipulation of it, and its manipulation of you, and instead feel inserted so deeply inside the game that your mind, and your feelings, become as seemingly crucial to its operation as its many millions of lines of code. It is the sensation that the game itself is suddenly unknowably alive as you are.

PLUMBER'S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE! is a story, but it is a rudimentary fairytale story without any of the proper fairytale's evocative nuances and dreads.

The suicide John Kennedy Toole is probably the most famous True Outsider, though it pains me to admit that I regard A Confederacy of Dunces as one of the most overrated novels ever published. I am glad, all the same, that it was published, if only for the moments of reflection it caused those who rejected it to suffer.

I enjoyed what I read, but since I regarded- and regard- Saunder's work roughly as salable as a Hefty bag filled with hypos, I was too depressed to even write him back. I also suspected that, if I did, I was going to get an extremely loquacious pen pal (and perhaps even increasingly nude photos).

Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. I short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter that process.

Americanness is also the central, and centrally unexamined theme of The Room. Wiseau cast himself within the film as a hunk of Johnny Americana, with not corresponding recognition of how absurdly ill fitting this role actually is.

I believe," he said, "in what I call the secret mainstream. Kafka was there too. Today, yes, we know Kafka was the voice of an overwhelming bureaucracy with a deep evil inside of it. Often we see these figures in the secret mainstream. I am one of them.

Real fear, he now knew, took its power not from what could happen but what you realize will happen.