Top 100 Dave Eggers Quotes
#1. Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction ... it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.
Elissa Schappell
#2. 'Where The Wild Things Are,' I think I could have written on my own. When I brought Dave Eggers on, I already had 60 pages of notes. I technically could have, but I don't think I was ready to. I needed him to be there and help me.
Spike Jonze
#3. Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny and self-reflective.
Michael Showalter
#4. I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program.
James Bernard Frost
#5. Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerful prose; it's also his charitable works.
James Bernard Frost
#6. I regretted making a comment about Dave Eggers. I've never said anything about McSweeneys except that I admire what it is, and I think it's great that they keep people interested in literature.
James Frey
#7. Tommy Smothers is my longest mentor, and Dave Eggers is my youngest.
Don Novello
#8. I went to Dave Eggers with this idea of doing a movie about a guy going through some sort of Frank Capra-esque journey.
John Krasinski
#9. I love Dave Eggers. I hate Dave Eggers. If I could become any other living writer, I would answer faster than anyone else in the room, 'Dave Eggers.'
James Bernard Frost
#10. You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.
Dave Eggers
#11. 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.
Dave Eggers
#12. I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
#13. The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.
Dave Eggers
#14. This had happened to him before - in an effort to disappear, he had made himself more conspicuous.
Dave Eggers
#15. Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.
Dave Eggers
#16. People move up here pretty reliably, and as you know we hire almost exclusively from within. So
Dave Eggers
#17. Every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle's unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order.
Dave Eggers
#18. You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.
Dave Eggers
#20. Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.
Dave Eggers
#21. There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana
Dave Eggers
#22. As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind. No longer
Dave Eggers
#23. When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.
Dave Eggers
#24. and because total non-communication in a place like the Circle was so difficult, it felt like violence.
Dave Eggers
#25. It was like setting up a guillotine in the public square.You don't expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it.
Dave Eggers
#26. I know forever they will be in my house, the rooms of my mind, I know this and I have accepted this but while I know they will be there I want them dead there. I cannot have them breathing there! I want them in the floirboards of the basement of my soul.
Dave Eggers
#27. Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.
After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned
Dave Eggers
#28. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.
Dave Eggers
#29. No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.
Dave Eggers
#30. It only takes one person, one small act of stepping from the dark to the light.
Dave Eggers
#31. Americans are born knowing everything and nothing. Born moving forward, quickly, or thinking they are.
Dave Eggers
#32. Nicaragua sounded dangerous; she liked the word. Nicaragua! It sounded like some kind of spider. There it goes, under the table - Nicaragua!
Dave Eggers
#33. Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.
Dave Eggers
#34. Public-private leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services,
Dave Eggers
#35. My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.
Dave Eggers
#37. Something about how all this could or would lead to totalitarianism. Her stomach sank.
Dave Eggers
#38. But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
Dave Eggers
#39. Every act of charity has choice at its core.
Dave Eggers
#40. Who says we don't want to be inspired? We fucking want to be inspired! What the fuck is wrong with us wanting to be inspired? Everyone acts like it's some crazy idea, some outrageous ungrantable request. Don't we deserve grand human projects that give us meaning?
Dave Eggers
#41. They downloaded another customer query, and Mae scrolled through the boilerplates, found the appropriate answer, personalized it, and sent it back.
Dave Eggers
#42. Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.
Dave Eggers
#43. Carol turned around quickly as if stifling an urge to lunge at Max. He turned back to Max, straining to appear genial. "Okay," he said, "but will you come over here and put your head in my mouth again?"
Max continued to back up, "No, Carol. I don't want to right now.
Dave Eggers
#44. I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
Dave Eggers
#45. 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.
Dave Eggers
#46. I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
Dave Eggers
#47. Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let's not forget this.
Dave Eggers
#48. Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.
Dave Eggers
#49. I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.
Dave Eggers
#50. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
Dave Eggers
#51. You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you've done nothing good for yourself. That's the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.
Dave Eggers
#52. Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side.
Dave Eggers
#53. Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)
Dave Eggers
#54. Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.
Dave Eggers
#55. 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.
Dave Eggers
#56. He remained, weeks after awakening, in that period of early-morning consciousness that allows easy re-entry to dreaming. His limbs still tingled with the residue of sleep, and most days he wanted badly to allow it to overtake him again.
Dave Eggers
#57. How old are you?" the woman asked. "You look about eleven." "Twenty-four," Mae said. "My god. You don't have a mark on you. Were we ever twenty-four, my love?" She turned to the man, who was using a ballpoint pen to scratch the arch of his foot. He shrugged, and the woman let the matter drop.
Dave Eggers
#58. Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
Dave Eggers
#59. It was as if, for a moment, she thought Mae was one kind of person, but now, knowing she was another, she could part with her, she could give her back to the world.
Dave Eggers
#60. But it felt good to cry, to let her shoulders shake, to feel the hot tears on her face, to taste their baby salt, to wipe snot all over the underside of her shirt.
Dave Eggers
#61. Did you hear that crazy man? we said.
Education is your mother? we said.
We laughed and did imitations. We thought Mr. Kondit, like more than a few of the men and boys who had crossed the desert to get to Ethiopia, had lost his mind along the way.
Dave Eggers
#62. Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded?
Dave Eggers
#63. Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. "All this. The fucking shark that eats the world.
Dave Eggers
#64. Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Dave Eggers
#65. Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
Dave Eggers
#66. We are all feeding from each other, all the time, every day.
Dave Eggers
#67. So yeah, we put llamas everywhere. That was us. We just liked looking at them, so we bred about six million and spread them around.
Dave Eggers
#69. Some of the bank people were so young they'd never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they'd unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world.
Dave Eggers
#70. What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday.
Dave Eggers
#71. My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.
Dave Eggers
#72. She felt some measure of relief knowing that in the very least, on the open road she would have some time to think.
Dave Eggers
#73. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.
Dave Eggers
#74. If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.
Dave Eggers
#75. But that's one lifetime." Yeah." But while doing that one I'd want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail-" I know, on a boat you made yourself.
Dave Eggers
#76. They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.
Dave Eggers
#77. 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.
Dave Eggers
#78. Suffering is only suffering if it's done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
Dave Eggers
#79. Hand and I needed pants, pants to end all pants - warm and cool, breathing and trapping in, full of pockets.
Dave Eggers
#80. You don't know what it's like to be a man over thirty who's never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-happening.
Dave Eggers
#81. You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.
Dave Eggers
#82. They took my mother's stomach out six months ago.
Dave Eggers
#83. Memory, perhaps, should have no physical shape.
Dave Eggers
#84. Alan tried to reassure her the same way he always had.
--I'm the eye in the say, he said. I can see where you started and where you're going and it looks perfectly fine from up here.
Dave Eggers
#85. It looked a lot like a dog.
"What's that?" Max asked, expecting to hear about a mythical creature with a mythical name.
Carol squinted and put his hand over his eyes to see better. "Oh that's a dog," he said. "I don't talk to that guy anymore.
Dave Eggers
#86. But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons
Dave Eggers
#87. Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.
Dave Eggers
#88. The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt -
Dave Eggers
#89. There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.
Dave Eggers
#90. And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.
Dave Eggers
#91. There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving.
Dave Eggers
#92. This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.
Dave Eggers
#93. Too often they tell me to answer my doubts with prayer, which seems very much like addressing one's hunger by thinking of food.
Dave Eggers
#94. Coming out was so difficult until millions of other men and women came out. Then it got a lot easier,
Dave Eggers
#95. SECRETS ARE LIES SHARING IS CARING PRIVACY IS THEFT
Dave Eggers
#96. I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.
Dave Eggers
#97. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it's here that we need to be.
Dave Eggers
#98. Who were these people, all of them young couples, a few fabulous ones, tall thin-haired blondes with toned men in perfectly pressed jeans
neither fearing the loss of the other.
Dave Eggers
#99. I had the sensation that I might always be running like this, that I would always have to run, and that I would always be able to run.
Dave Eggers
#100. I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost.
Dave Eggers
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