John Quotes

Fly-fishing for wild trout on quiet waters must be one of the toughest and craziest ways to catch fish ever invented by man, as well as among the most frustrating and humiliating.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

If Plutarch is the essayist I want to believe he is, he would want us all to sit in his chair.

I wanted to create an environment in which more than just personal essays could be represented, and in which stranger approaches to making essays could be celebrated.

If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

You create your own audience, and your own community of peers, and in some ways you create your own forebears as well.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

I look for the kind of text that doesn't look like the writer I'm considering. Plutarch is a great example.

I like Plutarch because I've read him forever, and I know that he's incredibly funky, even though his mainstream image is as Mr. Unfunky.

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

difficulties only become problems when we separate ourselves from them instead of dealing with them directly and wholeheartedly.

Taigen Dan Leighton has lovingly illumined still another dimension of the human condition.

Our task is to accept each moment and move on from there, continuing to do our level best.

We live in a mystery. Our lives have flowed from exploding stars, from tides of time and gravity beyond our ken.

One of the best ways countries can combat poverty is to use development assistance to promote a growing private sector, in which the poor can fully participate.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.

Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.

I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.

Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.

The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.

The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.

People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself.

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.

I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

It's easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I'm tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares.

This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.