Joshua Ferris Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.

  Joshua Ferris

  Character, Responsibility, Decision

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

  Joshua Ferris

  Real, Reading, Mean

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  5 Copy quote

• I don't actually think of the internet as the bad guy. I think of the internet as doing a hell of a lot of wonderful, fascinating, interesting things. A lot of information that's exchanged on the internet is extremely useful, and every once in a while it percolates up to knowledge. Wisdom is far harder to come by.

  Joshua Ferris

  Thinking, Interesting, Guy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

  Joshua Ferris

  World, Comedy, Charisma

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.

  Joshua Ferris

  Thinking, People, Suffering

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• There were times where I felt I was pressing a little bit too hard with the humor, and I had to pull back, because the overriding concern of the book was to create this disease that had no cure and make you pay attention to every emotional stage of what happens.

  Joshua Ferris

  Book, Emotional, Attention

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• That's one of the things about comedy - I think it works best when it's contextualized, as opposed to kind of an island of cleverness.

  Joshua Ferris

  Thinking, Comedy, Kind

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

  Joshua Ferris

  Book, Important, Human Experience

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."

  Joshua Ferris

  Book, Character, Emotional

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

• Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

  Joshua Ferris

  Serious

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

  Joshua Ferris

  Emotional, Thinking, Succeed

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.

  Joshua Ferris

  Writing, Character, Fighting

  Source: www.avclub.com

  4 Copy quote

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