Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.
I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.
In my own little way, I feel like I'm part of a group of writers who care deeply about pushing the essay forward.
Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic.
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
You're one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else's.
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.
Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule.
The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.
I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.
You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life.
Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.
When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.
Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face.
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.
We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.
You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.
I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.
I don’t know what’s the matter with me, why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.
That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life.
I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.
I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own.
I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.
If the bus driver is black, I thank him... when I get off at my spot, whereas I would never think of doing this if the driver were white.
I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.
I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form.
The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.
I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.
The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.
The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.
The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity.
If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.
Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.
I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the composition-ally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative.
I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games.
The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched.
Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.
Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes.
Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market.
Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.