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I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.
Joshua Ferris
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Joshua Ferris
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: November 8
Author
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Danville
Illinois
Writing
Think
Thinking
Readership
Start
Idea
Someone
Ideas
More quotes by Joshua Ferris
I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen.
Joshua Ferris
The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time.
Joshua Ferris
A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.
Joshua Ferris
Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.
Joshua Ferris
If you can get by with quotes from The Godfather and nothing you say matters, that's pretty bleak, don't you think? Don't we want what we say to matter?
Joshua Ferris
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
I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.
Joshua Ferris
I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.
Joshua Ferris
We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.
Joshua Ferris
A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.
Joshua Ferris
If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially.
Joshua Ferris
After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.
Joshua Ferris
It is really irritating to work with irritating people
Joshua Ferris
I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.
Joshua Ferris
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
Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.
Joshua Ferris
Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.
Joshua Ferris
I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions.
Joshua Ferris
My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.
Joshua Ferris
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