John Jeremiah Sullivan Quotes

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

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.

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

One of the best things I’ve read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest.

What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

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

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.

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.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

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.