Quotes from Tom Bissell

I think the highest purpose of fiction is to show that all people are fundamentally worthy of mercy.

Were we not standing atop the birthplace of a certain kind of religious nationalism? Zion lay all around us. See where the Prophet left this earth, where Christ rose from the dead, where the Messiah would, finally, appear. Which of us, in this war, was not Judas to someone?

A disarmingly accurate generalization about assholes: They know a lot, however brittle their knowledge becomes under intimacy's whitest, hottest lights.

For this writer, evil was a matter not of behavior, or even choice, but of being.

What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing - solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing - is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.

David foster Wallace: '...the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail.[...] he trains you to study the world through the lens of his prose.' NYTimes, 7 Feb 2016

Even after I lost my religious faith, Christianity remained to me deeply and resonantly interesting, and I have long believed that anyone who does not find Christianity interesting has only his or her unfamiliarity with the topic to blame.

What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.

Scribes working throughout Christianity's first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament's discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.

To let the player play the story, tell his own story, and have that story be deep and meaningful?

Your work gets better when you let go of your anger," Harrison said. "Because anger is always didactic, and the didactic is of no value for a novelist

As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience. It

Somehow in all of this we are still capable of finding some illumination, some truth, some place where we step out of ourselves, where we are ecstatic, where we have an ecstatic, visionary realization.

It wasn't often that you got to see a man whose dreams were literally about to come true, but then the lights went down, and I couldn't see him anymore.

a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, "They do it ever so politely, and with a smile")

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.

I don't know how video game narrative works.

There's a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey.

Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate.

All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.