Quotes from John Jeremiah Sullivan

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.

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.

The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green - the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne.

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.

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.

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

Thinking you're a genius is death.

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

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.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip you ain't sayin' where, and all they want to know is: Credit or debit, tiny sir?

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.

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.

While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, "It's just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different" (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant). "Tell me which one of 'em gets out to help," the man said, "that's the one whose religion I'll listen to.

He was the kind of guy who was always telling you what kind of guy he was.

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?

Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.

They are trying to live, but they have no room to breathe. So they try harder and breathe less.

Nothing vexes me so much in stupidity as the fact that it is better pleased with itself than any reason can reasonably be. It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance.

He asked me to pour him some whiskey and announced flatly his intention to nap.

I retain a stupid, Romantic love for pens and pads. The stuff of writing still affects me. And I've always been someone who will go to the bathroom in the middle of dinner to write down something, a word or idea, that for whatever reason had not wanted to be lost. You have to be a squirrel in that way. You have to be a chipmunk, and what you are collecting are combinations of words.

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.

fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst.