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"A lot of people are very irritated by [a] kind of self-reference, and I am too. You're engaged on a primary level with the events. Everything else is extra. If you don't engage on a primary level, if the primary level is a level of self-reference than it's repellent. I think that there is a movement in literature that is, maybe call it post-post-modernism, but maybe it's just post-modernism which is a sense that there is a duty to entertain, that fiction is stories, that there is a certain fascination (so you might call it magic realism, or something like that), a certain fascination that literature has to have in order to do anything. Way early on I figured out that maybe the distinction was that modern literature contains symbols, whereas this kind of literature that I'm talking about is symbolic, doesn't contain symbols, but is a symbol. It is itself a quest or a journey or one of those kinds of magic or ritual forms, religious, basically religious forms, so it has an inherent fascination. In itself, the whole thing has a fascination. There's something about accessibility and the inherent fascination of tale-telling. Those kinds of things that I think of as being a new motion in literature. You don't drop all those investigations as to what literature can do and how it refers to itself and all that kind of stuff that makes its own genre. You just say, alright, how can we make it interesting? What would make an interesting realistic painting, now that we've gone through abstraction? Well there's magic realism and there's super realism and there's photo realism. There's all these different ways of finding a way to paint the real world, recognizably, entertainingly, engagingly, accessibly, but still modern right now." - EMV

"Reading Joseph Campbell especially has been an enlightenment to me. And then this Northrup Frye book [The Secular Scripture] about certain hidden structures, which are the structures of romance. We don't tell myths very much anymore, but the occasional science fiction novel will slide into myth. And romance does too. It can't really hurt to know how stories are told and what the functions of stories are, what stories really mean. How we are all, like it or not, in a story. You can't get out of being in story. Which is also a joke about literature, too. When you're reading a story, of course you can't get out of a story, these people are in a book. I think a book has a certain shape, and that the characters are defined by the shape of the book. They're in between covers of a book." - EMV

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