Quotes by John Jeremiah Sullivan

About John Jeremiah Sullivan:

John Jeremiah Sullivan is an American writer and editor. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and southern editor of The Paris Review.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

Thinking you're a genius is death.

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

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

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

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

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 pa...

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 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

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

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

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

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

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

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 u...

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Jeremiah Sullivan
  • Descriptionwriter
  • Born1974
  • ProfessionJournalist