Quotes by Tom Bissell - Page 1

Fun is not the same thing as fulfillment.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Fulfillment
Fun
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Girlfriends, indeed: the anti-video game.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Games
Girlfriend
Video
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I don't know how video game narrative works.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Narrative
Video Game
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The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Narrative
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Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Book
Reading
Thinking
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A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Doe
Wish
Writing
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To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Believe
Ifs
Magic
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When I play too many video games I begin to feel chubby-minded, caffeinated, bad.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Games
Play
Video
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The underwater businessman philosopher Andrew Ryan was BioShock's unforgettable villain.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Andrew
Philosopher
Underwater
Villain
Ryan
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There's a sense of fiction in every video game. It creates a world for itself that you want to obey.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Creates
Obey
Video Game
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Most non-readers are nothing but an agglomeration of third-hand opinion and blindly received wisdom.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Hands
Opinion
Reader
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Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Ambiguous
Games
Roaming
Stories
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The average action game doesn't much traffic in thematic grandiosity, but the BioShock games are different.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Average
Thematic
Traffic
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Often the art in a video game is like glorified Thomas Kinkade, but some of it is genuinely enchanting and compelling.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Compelling
Enchanting
Genuinely
Glorified
Thomas
Video Game
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An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Addresses
Artist
Facts
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I'm an Old Media guy. I don't have a website; I don't Twitter. I love magazines, yet I love video games. It's a strange disconnect.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Magazines
Website
Twitter
Disconnect
Video Games
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I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Nonfiction
Myself Eyes Look
Fiction Writer
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Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Deserve
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Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Imitation
Impossible
Seductive
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All video games are games, obviously. They're designed. They're digital. They have rules; they give an audience some type of vicarious experience.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Digital
Designed
Video Games
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Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Collision
Epoch
Native
Ongoing
Particular
Cultural
Cycle
North
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For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Editing
Perform
Camera
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We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Children
Games
School
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All the stuff I love most in game storytelling is never the big-picture stuff; it's the stuff that feels like curlicues, stuff that's just there because it's a game and because you can do it.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
You Can Do It
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My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Dna
Nonfiction
Prose
Texture
Fictional
Page
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I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Structure
Derives
Short Stories
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I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
California
Homeless
Pretense
Sacramento
Torn
Apart
Masks
Noticed
Occasionally
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I have an immensely understanding partner who does something creative herself, and we both need a lot of time alone. I structure my life around getting my work done, first and foremost. Everything else is secondary. That's the only way I've been able to do it.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Alone
Creative
Structure
Understanding
Life Time Work
Life Alone Time
Life Alone Work
Everything Else
Foremost
Herself
Immensely
Partner
Secondary
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I mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Aesthetic
Formal
Incompetence
Shocked
Always Character Me
Associated
Concerns
Character Game Me
Medium
Video Game
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Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Angle
Articulate
Medium
Oblique
Occupy
Reliably
Sphere
Stands
Video Game
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Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Clear
Games
Mediums
Position
Storytelling
Me Game More
Stand
Admitted
Game
Became
Beside
Game Me Know
Enthusiastically
Prior
Proudly
Shall
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The way games are designed is you create a story, and then you create an obstacle course inside that story, and the player has to endure it to see more. So it's artificial. Game designers are so intensely worried about people getting bored that they pile on busy work for players to do.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Artificial
Bored
Busy
Endure
Worried
Work Game People
Designed
Intensely
Obstacle
Pile
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I like reading books with both hands, with my heart pumping, with blood on the page. So I'm interested in people who make stuff, and I'm interested in the lives that make the text. To read a book or watch a movie any other way, to me, personally, feels like a waste of time and misapplication of energy.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Reading Books
Waste
Time Heart Me
Any Other Way
Page
Pumping
Text
Waste Of Time
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Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Creative Writing
Dread
Meticulous
Punctuation
Classes
Developed
Manuscript
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To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Believe
Magic
Stories
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[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life-the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes-ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.
Tom Bissell / Journalist
Believe
Book
Editing
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Tom Bissell Quotes - Page 1

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