Top 40 Dave Eggers Quotes

It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.

Well, my background is journalism. I don’t have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It’s very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students’ work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.

I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

I think there’s a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.

High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.

I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

I’m an amateur science enthusiast. I’m not even a professional enthusiast. I don’t know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they’re smart people. But you don’t throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.

The house is a factory.

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.

I think newspapers shouldn’t try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.

It’s so easy to print in the Midwest. You’re saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

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.

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there’s less pressure to figure all that out.

McSweeney’s as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.

But you know, there’s something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention – they go home, they’re finished. They don’t stall, they don’t do their homework in front of the TV.

I don’t mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn’t feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.

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.

Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I’d like to see them again. And I’d love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalize all that chaos.

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents’ lives and problems.

If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

But I’m thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

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.

Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn’t so good at that.

I’ve never had WiFi at home. I’m too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.

I publish my own books, so there isn’t a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.