Top 35 John Jeremiah Sullivan Quotes
#1. The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#2. Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#3. They are trying to live, but they have no room to breathe. So they try harder and breathe less.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#4. We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#5. And on the second OOOOOOOO, you picture just a naked glowing green skull that hangs there vibrating gape-mouthed in a prison cell. Or whatever it is you picture.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#6. Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#7. When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime's view? It weighed on him.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#8. What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept "enemy" the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#9. I want to stay in touch with what I have in common with my subjects, with the places where are equally implicated with whatever is wrong with the culture.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#10. I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#13. Century after century, we have prosecuted our insane conflicts from atop their backs, resting on their sturdy necks when we grew weary, eating their flesh when we were starving, disemboweling them and crawling inside their bodies when we were freezing.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#15. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#17. It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#18. Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#19. I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#20. I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#21. Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#22. Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#23. A good writer wants from us - or has no right to ask more than - intelligence, good faith and time.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#24. The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#25. Maybe the greatest gift marriage gives us is the chance to fantasize, to imagine that there's more to life than there actually is, and it accomplishes this by assuming responsibility for all the misery and dullness that we would otherwise equate with life itself.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#26. There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#27. Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#28. This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping ...
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#29. At 'GQ,' there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#32. Going to any place that you view as more politically oppressed than your own country, there's a weird tendency to assume that the whole existence is determined minute by minute by the political reality, but of course, that's not the case for any of us.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#34. The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#35. This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
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