When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they’re smart people. But you don’t throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.
I am a bike enthusiast; there’s a certain amount of romance to bikes. They’re both beautiful and utilitarian.
The pain is not great. But the symbolism is disagreeable.
A combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating.
There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana.
Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.
McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
He was feeling buoyant, flexible. He wanted to go jogging. He stood. He couldn’t go jogging. He called room service and ordered a basket of breads and pastries.
I’m interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.
Well, my background is journalism. I don’t have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
When I’m doing work online or on the computer, it’s one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen.
Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.
But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalize all that chaos.
I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.
I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.