Dave Eggers's Quotes

McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.

The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.

The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there's less pressure to figure all that out.

There are many Saudi women doctors, and there are many wealthy and powerful and well-educated Saudi women who circumvent the restrictions put upon them, quietly or otherwise.

Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.

Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it's a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.

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.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

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.

I think I'm far too hopeful and trusting. That's something I got from my mum.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

I don't mean to beat a made-in-America drum, but I would be lying if I said it doesn't feel somehow right to be printing books in the U.S.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day.

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.