I think the Simpsons is important art.  On the other hand, it's also-- in my opinion-- relentlessly corrosive to the soul, and everything is parodied, and everything's ridiculous.  Maybe I'm old, but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it, and I sort of have to walk away and look at a flower or something.  If there's something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the "inner sap"-- the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff-- and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people.  I don't know that it's that irony tyrannizes us, but the fashions that are so easy to criticize but are so incredibly powerful and authentic-seeming when we're inside them, tyrannize us.  I don't know that it's ever been any different.  That probably makes no sense.  That was my experiment at telling the truth.

--David Foster Wallace