John Jeremiah Sullivan Quotes & Sayings

I want to stay in touch with what I have in common with my subjects, with the places where are equally implicated with whatever is wrong with the culture. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

And on the second OOOOOOOO, you picture just a naked glowing green skull that hangs there vibrating gape-mouthed in a prison cell. Or whatever it is you picture. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

A good writer wants from us - or has no right to ask more than - intelligence, good faith and time. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word-tension-has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end-is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We've known this for a long time. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

They are trying to live, but they have no room to breathe. So they try harder and breathe less. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I've come to think that one reason for the oppressive predictability of polemical essays can be found in today's polarized social and political climate. To paraphrase Emerson: "If I know your party, I anticipate your argument." Not merely about politics but about everything. Clearly this acrimonious state of affairs is not conducive to writing essays that display independent thought and complex perspectives. Most of us open magazines, newspapers, and websites knowing precisely what to expect. Many readers apparently enjoy being members of the choir. In our rancorously partisan environment, conclusions don't follow from premises and evidence but precede them. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

We need others to bring us back into the comity of human life. This appears to have been the final lesson for me - to appreciate someone's embrace not as forgiveness or as an amicable judgment but as an acknowledgment that from time to time private life becomes brutally hard for every one of us, and that without one another, without some sort of community, the nightmare is prone to lurk, waiting for an opening. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Going to any place that you view as more politically oppressed than your own country, there's a weird tendency to assume that the whole existence is determined minute by minute by the political reality, but of course, that's not the case for any of us. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept "enemy" the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Maybe the greatest gift marriage gives us is the chance to fantasize, to imagine that there's more to life than there actually is, and it accomplishes this by assuming responsibility for all the misery and dullness that we would otherwise equate with life itself. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

invisibility is a luxury. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping ... — John Jeremiah Sullivan

It's just amazing the lengths people go to, to be thought of as special. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Nothing vexes me so much in stupidity as the fact that it is better pleased with itself than any reason can reasonably be. It is unfortunate that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and trust yourself, and always sends you away discontented and diffident, whereas opinionativeness and heedlessness fill their hosts with rejoicing and assurance. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Every unhappy family is periodically ransacked by joy. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime's view? It weighed on him. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

When certain individuals feel severely threatened - emotionally, financially, physically - the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

One of the best things I've read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Will "trigger warnings" simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would Grapes of Wrath be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of The Best American Essays, for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn't green - the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It's that the greenness doesn't mean what it seems. It doesn't encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Thinking you're a genius is death. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, "It's just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different" (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant).
"Tell me which one of 'em gets out to help," the man said, "that's the one whose religion I'll listen to. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Century after century, we have prosecuted our insane conflicts from atop their backs, resting on their sturdy necks when we grew weary, eating their flesh when we were starving, disemboweling them and crawling inside their bodies when we were freezing. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive it. That would mean forms and fees, possibly even background checks. But show up at any RV joint with your thigh stumps lashed to a skateboard, crazily waving your hooks-for-hands, screaming you want that twenty-nine-footer out back for a trip you ain't sayin' where, and all they want to know is: Credit or debit, tiny sir? — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

What's old doesn't need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

At 'GQ,' there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want. — John Jeremiah Sullivan