Y'like candy?

Yeah. Of course.

What if you ate it all the time? What would be wrong with that?

Bad for teeth and very fat very quick.

Real pleasurable, but it dudn't have any calories in it. There's somethin' really vital about food that candy's missing, although to make up for what it's missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up. There seems to me to be some analogy to what--I'm talking about very seductive commercial entertainment. There's nothing sinister, the thing that's sinister about it is that the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it's missing is a kind of ... addictive, self-consuming pleasure. And what saves us is that most entertainment isn't very good. (Laughs)

[...]

I guess entertainment would describe a continuum--I guess what I'm talkin' about is entertainment versus art, where the main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash somehow. I mean that's really what it is ... And I'm not, there's nothin' per se wrong with that. And the compensation for that is it delivers value for the cash. It gives you a certain kind of pleasur that I would argue is fairly passive. There's not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy, like "I am this guy, I'm having this adventure." And it's a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that's fine--I think sort of the same way candy is fine.

[Of course, one interesting thing is he buys Pop-Tarts and stuff to eat; lots of candy.]

The problem for me is in entertainment, it's, at least in the book--God, if the book comes off as some kind of indictment of entertainment, then it fails. It's sort of about our relationship to it. The book isn't supposed to be about drugs, getting off drugs. Except as the fact that drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.

[...]

I'm not saying there's something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment. I'm saying it's--I'm saying it's a continuum. And if the book's about anything, it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit; it's about me. Why am I doing it? And what is so American about what I'm doing?