Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" There is this idea of 'north,' and if you're from Michigan and you wandered the Upper Peninsula, you know what it feels like. The sky has a particular vibe, a coldness, stretching into the upper reaches of Canada. "

Related Quotes:

" I write first drafts by hand, often out of the house somewhere, and then, when I've got a draft, type it up and let it sit, sometimes for a long time, and then when I'm ready, I work on revision. "

David Means

Long Time

Sit

Long

" I find the middle classes kind of boring. The middle class has kind of been beaten like a dead horse by fictional writers. It's old news, and literature is supposed to bring new news, and for me, I feel I have to go as far out as I can to try and tell the kind of stories I want to tell. "

David Means

Literature

News

" Iggy Pop is a pure Michigan product - gritty, smart, but not afraid of looking stupid or foolish. His father was once a high school English teacher. I love Iggy as a physical entity, sinewy, twisty - even in old age - an embodiment of rock and roll history. "

" A kiss is often about the future and the past. A lost dream, about the discretion of the idealism. "

" Americans are pragmatic; we want quick, clean, simple solutions to vast problems. The paradox is that we're a deeply confessional culture, but we're not often contemplative. "

" Folk songs, whatever else they might be, are mainly craft. "

" Every interaction with another person involves a dance of expectation, even when you're just passing someone in the street. Inside those moments - however brief they may be - there is a kind of anticipatory silence. "

" Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush. "

David Means

Vietnam

Trauma

" History is delusional. Not just an illusion, it's a delusion. America is this giant country, so it has these big delusions, and history is where delusions play out. "

" I think a good story can do as much as a novel; not the exact same thing, of course, but just as much artistically. They're different beasts, but to tackle an expansive country like the United States, you're either going to write a big novel, or go in to various points on the map and write stories or poems. "

" I was an at-home father, taking care of them for seven years when they were babies. I was one of those new-age, at-home dads. "

" America turns its back on the mentally ill. It likes to think it doesn't, but it does. "

" It's better to know your story than not to know. "

" A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs. "

" You don't know what you need when you're a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you're deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement. "

" There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction. "

" I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played 'At Folsom Prison' constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then, I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican. "

" I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War. "

" I'm a relatively optimistic kind of guy. "

" Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation. "

" I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story. "

" As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing. "

" You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make. "

" I like landscape, I guess. It's kind of a game to see how you can describe it. "

David Means

See

Landscape

" I don't think you could write fiction or create art unless you are sort of a positive person. "

" I think that those moments before a performer plays are the moments when the potential for something to be created may - or may not - arrive. "

" Alice Munro is an atomic writer blasting doors into narrative time. "

" Typically, I spend a lot of time - mostly in the morning - kind of drifting, reading, walking down along the river, looking at photographs, or even driving around. Then, if I'm lucky, I get to work in the early afternoon, one way or another. "

" What I appreciate about Radiohead's work - and it's most evident in 'Hail to the Thief' - is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band's albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness. "

" I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say. "