The essays are different because ultimately it’s things I’m interested in, and I’m really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
If I’m around spiders, my fear isn’t so much the spider, but my fear is that I’m somewhere rustic and that spiders are crawling around. I must be in the woods.
When you’re writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can’t swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you’re writing for the next day.
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
It’s peculiar what you remember when you’re not trying.
The things he did on purpose were usually no different from the mistakes he made by accident.
I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.
I’m good at being by myself. I guess if you’re a writer you get used to that.
Styx and The Stones may break my bones but ‘More than Words’ will never hurt me.
You’re trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I’m totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn’t seem to care.
If you’re doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you’re not going to have a relationship with them, they’re not going to like you, they’re not going to be your friend.
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it’s based on is whether it’s good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and trying to rewrite it.
I care about strangers when they’re abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they’re literally in front of me.
In the Far East, it’s very normal for people to wear masks in flu season. I don’t know if I’d ever do that, though, because I don’t like having things on my face.
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn’t afford a home computer – I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn’t be so bad.
What’s hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.
When I’m walking around, I’m usually drinking pop, so I can’t have a mask on. That’s why I couldn’t be a surgeon.
Even eternally free people are enslaved by the process of living.