Joshua Ferris Quotes

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

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.

The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time on it, there's not really that nagging sensation of existential despair; it erases it very effectively. And it's monolithic. And thanks to it, we've got the ways to linger there after death - your blog exists afterwards, your e-mail exists afterwards.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

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.

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.

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates.

She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that's all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let's just face facts here and say that when a woman - no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.

I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

Everything was always something but something – and here was the rub – could never be everything.

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.

I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.