Latest Jim Shepard Quotes from Interviews

• The etiquette of blurbs means it's not hard to not blurb something (if it's not by a friend, or student): everyone knows how many books you're deluged with. You can just say you never got to it.

  Jim Shepard

  Book, Mean, Students

  Source: therumpus.net

• I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wanted to adopt Project X. Errol was a hoot. I loved talking with him. We were a good match, too, because we both kept joking that we'd found the only other person on earth more ambivalent than we were about the project.

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Talking, Directors

  Source: therumpus.net

• I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

  Jim Shepard

  Reading, Fiction, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Details, Sticks

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think there's no question that historians create; they would tell you that, I think. If I'm trying to imagine an imperial Roman position, it's much easier to imagine the poor schlub who's not even sure why he's doing what he's doing than it is to imagine Caesar. At least for me. And I'm intrigued, too, by the position of the poor schlub who *still* finds himself supporting the imperial project.

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Trying, Imagine

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again.

  Jim Shepard

  Moving, Character, Understanding

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.

  Jim Shepard

  Commitment, Thinking, Empathy

  Source: therumpus.net

• Empathy is a human trait. But lots of humans exercise some traits more energetically than others. By "the usefulness of empathy" I mean the way in which a progressive might claim that empathy is a crucial aspect of any benign political system, and the way a conservative might argue that not only is it not necessary, but it might not even be all that helpful, in that regard.

  Jim Shepard

  Mean, Exercise, Empathy

  Source: therumpus.net

• I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

  Jim Shepard

  Important, Trying, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

• Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly research teaches me about the world. Which often shows me the way, in terms of the story.

  Jim Shepard

  Procrastination, Doe, Genius

  Source: therumpus.net

• I love the box that such a decision puts you in, and I love the interest the reader has in seeing how you negotiate that box: that seemingly hugely narrowed set of options. I also like the way in which it reminds us that we connect to the real world. That our relationship to the world matters.

  Jim Shepard

  Real, Decision, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

  Jim Shepard

  People

  Source: therumpus.net

• I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself.

  Jim Shepard

  Trying, Example, Assistants

  Source: therumpus.net

• Oh, I usually don't know a whole lot about a subject when I begin; the process itself teaches me a lot as I go along. Usually I know enough about one narrow area of the subject to start myself going, and then everything - including a lot more research - follows from that.

  Jim Shepard

  Research, Enough, Process

  Source: therumpus.net

• Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

  Jim Shepard

  Thinking, Way, Planning

  Source: therumpus.net

• Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

  Jim Shepard

  Race, Media, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

  Jim Shepard

  Distance, Thinking, Clay

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

  Jim Shepard

  Exercise, Thinking, Imagination

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it seems like it would make a good story.

  Jim Shepard

  Emotional, Imagination, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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