Joe

“The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural condition. The country is prosperous, yes, and he understands that the people value peace, that they prefer to spin out their destinies in placid, undisturbed fashion. But his destiny, he says, is to alter the map of the world. He is considering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but interesting, complex, dicey, even. He would very much like to consult with you about them. He asks you to change, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase “egregious usurpations” to “symbols of benign transformation.” Please initial the change on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.”
― Donald Barthelme, 40 Stories

“It hadn’t always been this way. Something must have changed for them somewhere. They just couldn’t work out what.

They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update – the intro­duction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between those minutiae and the way in which social me­dia had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire.”
― Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection

“Child prodigies got pickled by their talent and rendered emotionally childlike for the rest of their lives. Too much expectation at too early an age gave an air of premature maturity that later in life turned out to be immaturity.”
― Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures

“My tastes in reading lately have been way more realistic, because most experimental stuff is hellaciously unfun to read.

Because ideas are primary? And then the writing goes bad?

I’m not sure if it’s poorly written: It requires an amount of work on the part of the reader that’s grotesquely disproportionate to its payoff. And it seems—when I am a reader of that kind of stuff, and I’m talking like heavy-duty experimental stuff, some of which I have to read just because I do various stuff with experimental press. I feel like I am as a reader like a small child, and adults are having a conversation over my head; that this is really a book being written for other writers, theorists, and critics. And that any of that kind of stomach magic of, “God damn, it’s fun to read. I’d rather read right now than eat,” has been totally lost.”
― David Lipsky, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace