Words matter. These are the best Daniel Mallory Ortberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Usually my writing is very over the top and bombastic and very, like, ‘I’m amazing! Look at me!’
One of the things that would be great is to some day have so many women comedy writers that we wouldn’t say there’s just one type of female humor. There’s lots.
I read my first P.G. Wodehouse when I was 12.
I’m really not a journalist, and I don’t do a ton of newsy pieces. Occasionally I’ll write about something that’s going on recently, but I really don’t do a ton of stuff that’s tied to current events.
Did you know that, pound for pound, the moose is the leanest ruminant on Earth? It’s true. Moose are very in tune with their natural surroundings.
I spent the first 22 years of my life absorbing everything, like a big disgusting cell, and now I’m disgorging it with jokes added out into the world. That’s a really gross metaphor.
In the hands of a passive-aggressive person who wants to abdicate responsibility for things, texting is a great tool. You can really go nuts.
We went to church twice a week. My parents were employed in ministry; we prayed before dinner. We rollerbladed in the summer. We were allowed to watch the ‘Simpsons.’ I fought with my younger brother over Legos.
I have fun going on Twitter and the Internet. I feel safe and comfortable, and I wish everyone could feel that way.
Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.
In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski.
The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can’t keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the customer’s side of the partition.
My parents are both pastors. In the ’80s and ’90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman – especially a married woman and a mother – to be a pastor.
After I do my first writing of the day, I will generally look at Twitter and Google News – and that’s my big media secret. I look at Twitter and I look at Google because they pull all the headlines from other websites.
I love ‘Jane Eyre,’ and I love the Bronte sisters. I actually didn’t read any of them until I was in college, so I don’t have quite the same connection with them that I think a lot of women do.
The Toast’s audience is about 30-35 percent male, which shocked me because I would say that we actively try to discourage men from reading our site. Apparently, there’s not insignificant number of dudes out there who think that what we are doing is okay.
It’s an unfortunate reality of life that toxins are constantly building up in our bodies.
I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.
I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian.
It certainly was unusual growing up with two fairly well-known pastors as my parents.
Usually, the first thing I do when I wake up is I start working, so I often won’t start the day by reading anything because I like to minimize my ‘commute’ as much as possible. I wake up, open my laptop and start working in bed.
With a few exceptions, birds are not to be trusted; it is not normal to have such soft, vulnerable bodies bookended with slashing beaks and razor-sharp claws. It is as unnatural as an armed marshmallow.
I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.
My credentials, briefly: I no longer go to church or believe in God, but I can still name every one of the fruits of the Spirit and reeled for days upon hearing the announcement that Audio Adrenaline was reunited with one of the singers from DC Talk.
Anything where I get to write a lot of jokes and have a lot of creative control – that’s all I want.
Everyone wants to be liked; everyone wants approval. No one likes being ignored.
I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It’s always a really cool perspective.
When I was twenty years old, I had gum grafts put in.
I’m on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It’s great for jokes. But when I’m writing, I can’t do anything else. I can’t even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can’t multitask.
When I think of Emily Dickinson, there’s not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.
