Jess Quotes

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

Believe that you have it, and you have it.

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.

I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.

He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.

What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?

No one gets to tell you what your life means!

The form is so malleable and can do so many things.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.

He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

All we have is the story we tell.

You have to do disappointment twice.

You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.

You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.

I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.

If you're having a bad day already and everybody is just asking you petty questions, it drives people to the edge, or something really small will have a really large effect.

In L.A., I like to surf. I went through a phase - I was surfing four days a week. I'm still not good at it; I still spend most of my time falling.

I wouldn't say personally that I have problems communicating with men - though I'm not sure what the men would say.

You're not going to learn how to do it until you do it.