Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggersis an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the founder of McSweeney's, a literary journal; the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and a human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness, and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1970
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.
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.
Most people would trade everything they know, everyone they know- they'd trade it all to know they've been seen, and acknowledged, that they might even be remembered. We all know the world is too big for us to be significant. So all we have is the hope of being seen, or heard, even for a moment.
Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.
But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.
I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
Live long enough and you'll disappoint everyone. People think you're able to help them and usually you can't. And so it becomes a process of choosing the one or two people you try hardest not to disappoint. The person in my life I am determined not to disappoint is you.
People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.
But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be.