Latest Dave Eggers Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I love to be surprised or challenged or told that I know less than I thought that I knew. I know it's an old saw, but the older I get the less I know I know.

  Dave Eggers

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Now I'm in nonfiction. To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way. There's always that matching of the content and the form, and that means everything to me. I spend years thinking about what that match is going to be before I can really make it work.

  Dave Eggers

  Mean, Thinking, Begging

• We're in an era where they've sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there's no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there's strain, you know? There's a lot of pressure, things can't be perfect, parents can't be perfect all the time. There's a divorce, there's money issues, whatever. People work, so you don't always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy.

  Dave Eggers

  Couple, Crazy, Kids

  Source: www.avclub.com

• My parents told me they were going to kill me at least a thousand times growing up. "I'm gonna kill you," and then they'd whack me on the side of the head or whatever. And "What's wrong with you?" And "I'm gonna lock you up," and "I'm gonna throw you out the window," and "I'm gonna kill you." You know, all these things that you say in the heat of a normal chaotic household.

  Dave Eggers

  Growing Up, Parent, Window

  "Where The Wild Things Are roundtable". Interview with Steve Heisler, film.avclub.com. October 15, 2009.

• When you adapt a book, you really have to cut it to the essence.

  Dave Eggers

  Book, Cutting

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.

  Dave Eggers

  Kids, Thinking, Track

  "If You’re Reading About “The Circle” on Facebook, It’s Already Too Late". Interview With Clive Thompson, www.motherjones.com. May/June 2017.

• I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

  Dave Eggers

  Book, Self, People

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 23, 2005.

• I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

  Dave Eggers

  Self, Fiction, Artistic

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 23, 2005.

• Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.

  Dave Eggers

  Loneliness, Writing

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 23, 2005.

• I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

  Dave Eggers

  Hard Times, Suits You, Car

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 23, 2005.

• I think there's great value to the Associated Press and to Reuters, but if you wanted to generate original content, maybe written by local writers, it just takes a little bit of openness to open your pages up to a wider freelance writer pool, and then you might find new voices and a wider array of voices, and definitely more original content that can't be found anywhere else.

  Dave Eggers

  Thinking, Voice, Littles

  Interview with Scott Gordon, www.avclub.com. January 1, 2010.

• We've lost that very simple transaction that's so pure, where a reader can say, "I support what you're doing, here's my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here's my 50-cent contribution each day." It's just so tidy, and I think so inspiring.

  Dave Eggers

  Simple, Thinking, Government

  Interview with Scott Gordon, www.avclub.com. January 1, 2010.

• I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning. I just have an affection for paper, and that's no secret, I guess.

  Dave Eggers

  Morning, Secret, News

  Interview with Scott Gordon, www.avclub.com. January 1, 2010.

• To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers, and all these other sources of revenue that are sort of provisional, but haven't been proven yet.

  Dave Eggers

  Party, Simple, Support

  Interview with Scott Gordon, www.avclub.com. January 1, 2010.

• Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

  Dave Eggers

  Powerful, Book, Voice