“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.”
— Dave Eggers
“It’s not that our family has no taste, it’s just that our family’s taste is inconsistent.”
— Dave Eggers
“I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’.”
— Dave Eggers
“So this is the space during tutoring hours. It’s very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students’ work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.”
— Dave Eggers
“It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur.”
— Dave Eggers
“The death of a young person for no reason is an apocalypse.”
— Dave Eggers
“It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we’re losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
— Dave Eggers
“The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.”
— Dave Eggers
“You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.”
— Dave Eggers
“Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.”
— Dave Eggers
“You and I read the same books and hear the same sermons and we come away with different messages. That has to be evidence of some serious problem, right?”
— Dave Eggers
“No. There is no balance, and no retribution, and no rules. The rules and balances you blather about are hopeful creations of a man fearing death.”
— Dave Eggers
“His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.”
— Dave Eggers
“When you’re in your twenties in a new city where no one’s from here, we’re all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You’re only as good as the reliability of that latticework.”
— Dave Eggers
“I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”
— Dave Eggers
“You look at pictures of Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there.”
— Dave Eggers
“If things continue this way, there will be two societies – or at least I hope there will be two – the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.”
— Dave Eggers
“So many of the things I invented I honestly did for fun, out of some perverse game of whether or not they’d work, whether people would use them. I mean, it was like setting up a guillotine in the public square. You don’t expect a thousand people to line up to put their heads in it”
— Dave Eggers
“That’s what’s new. There used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We’re closing the circle around everyone—it’s a totalitarian nightmare.”
— Dave Eggers
“Yousef had been lighthearted during his questions, but there was something very serious and sad under his smile, and Alan knew what it was. It was the knowledge that there would be no fighting, and there would be no struggle, no stand taken, and that the two of them, because they were not lacking materially, because despite injustices in their countries they were the recipients of preposterous bounty, would likely do nothing. They were content, they had won. The fighting would be done by others, elsewhere.”
— Dave Eggers
“The issue is complex, but like many matters in Sudan, it is not as complex as Khartoum would want the west to believe.”
— Dave Eggers
“People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.”
— Dave Eggers
“Thank you,” he says.”Thank who?””I don’t know.”
— Dave Eggers
“I wondered quickly if I’d give my life so that a dragon could live. If someone offered me that deal, your life for the existence of dragons.I thought maybe yes, maybe no.”
— Dave Eggers
“Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?”
— Dave Eggers
“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”
— Dave Eggers
“Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV’s “Real World.” Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche’s, due. I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!Oscar Wilde wrote, “Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating… [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write.” As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.”
— Dave Eggers
“Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything.”
— Dave Eggers
“Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn’t our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we’re vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she’s at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We’re static and we’re empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.”
— Dave Eggers
“You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.”
— Dave Eggers