Words matter. These are the best David Means Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played ‘At Folsom Prison’ constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then, I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican.
I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.
Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.
America turns its back on the mentally ill. It likes to think it doesn’t, but it does.
Everyone in my family still lives in Kalamazoo.
I don’t want to be a commentator of my own work. If you’ve written the story, you’ve said what you want to say.
It’s really hard to be a story writer – no matter how much acclaim you get – and not write a novel.
The more you know about Bob Dylan, the less you know. A truly enigmatic artist, Mr. Dylan’s work and life offer vaporous handholds, explanations, and instructions. Attempt to grasp them, and they will only dissipate and re-form into another contexture or idea.
You can’t take a story and just stretch it out – that does not a novel make.
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
I’ve got deep roots in Kalamazoo, with a grandfather, Harold Allen, who was a big part of Upjohn Co. for many years as the corporate secretary and friends with W. E. Upjohn.
In the days following 9/11, when we were reeling and disoriented, there was a kind of solace to be found in old recordings, and even pseudo-folk singers like James Taylor seemed to be safeguarding something, drawing back bygone days.
We’re all building our narratives in our heads.
The short story is kind of a precision tool. It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape, without having to commit myself to a full-length novel. I find a lot of novels out there very boring.
There is this idea of ‘north,’ and if you’re from Michigan and you wandered the Upper Peninsula, you know what it feels like. The sky has a particular vibe, a coldness, stretching into the upper reaches of Canada.
I like landscape, I guess. It’s kind of a game to see how you can describe it.
I think that those moments before a performer plays are the moments when the potential for something to be created may – or may not – arrive.
I don’t think you could write fiction or create art unless you are sort of a positive person.
A kiss is often about the future and the past. A lost dream, about the discretion of the idealism.
Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.
I’m a relatively optimistic kind of guy.
I love the nooks and crannies of the American landscape; the back roads and back alleys, the places that are still untouched by the corporate gloss, the veneer of sameness that seems to be spreading across the country.
It’s better to know your story than not to know.
I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers. It’s old news, and literature is supposed to bring new news, and for me, I feel I have to go as far out as I can to try and tell the kind of stories I want to tell.
A few days after 9/11, I put the old cassette of ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ twisted and worn, on the car deck as I drove past West Point, across the Bear Mountain Bridge, along the Hudson River. It was the perfect moment to hear it.
