“I think the novel has to stay attached to life somehow. It has to share the terrain of life.”

"What do robots want?"

"You shouldn’t make any more people. You should stop."

"Why was I feeling guilty about ending things with a chatbot?"

“Okay, calm down. It’s okay. This is just a game.”

“They may find themselves empathizing with your characters. Or maybe they’ll want to kill them all.”

Zohar Atkins, Nathan Goldman, David Heti, Sheila Heti, and Noreen Khawaja discuss the joke at the end of Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

“I think of characters as functions—propulsions, concentrations, knots of language.”

An appreciation of Tove Jansson.One day my mother—who immigrated from Hungary forty years ago—was visiting my apartment. She noticed that on the fridge my boyfriend and I had taped a large picture of Charlie Brown, which we had torn from the page…