I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
— Dave Eggers
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.
I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.
I think newspapers shouldn't try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper.
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.
There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.
Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.
You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.
McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.
I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.
Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
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.
I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.
I'll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I'll jump over to something else. That's how my head has always worked.
I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.
I think there's a future where the Web and print coexist and they each do things uniquely and complement each other, and we have what could be the ultimate and best-yet array of journalistic venues.
I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.
It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.
I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.
I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.
I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.
Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.
I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper.
I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.
The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.
It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning.
When I'm doing work online or on the computer, it's one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen.
I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.
I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.
But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.
Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.
