John Jeremiah Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivan
John Jeremiah Sullivanis an American writer and editor. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and southern editor of The Paris Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
enter generating simply
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.
known time
As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We've known this for a long time.
apart believer break gets remake revision tend time
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.
author comedy good secret watching
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.
english existed
It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
might preach reader
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.
assume case determined existence minute oppressed tendency view
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 us.
basement desk ireland starts
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.
common equally places stay whatever
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.
belong coming literary published steady york
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.
false folk ireland less mean pull swallow timeless trip wee
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 past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne.
books buy digest initial interviews phone stack
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.
tattoo rap rocks
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.
just-saying things-to-do
I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.