"I wanted to be an artist after all, and my teachers told me these were the best authors the 20th century had to offer. But these books sucked. They were so boring and sloppy and plotless. And Bob Dylan's lyrics seemed nonsensical to me - almost like he had just gotten high and written down whatever random thoughts occurred to him."
"I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett."
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"I was never a cool person; in fact, cool people have always made fun of me. That’s why I loved [the Robert Cormier YA novel] The Chocolate War - because the cool kids (not the establishment) were the villains. I totally identified with that."
""It's not just about Jen," he said. "It's about the entire romantic system. Ninety-nine percent of men are in love with the top one percent of women. And yet they often refuse to date us. It's a complete injustice."
"I admired the earnestness of these people, many of whom had joined Greenpeace and marched for noble things in their youth. But I didn’t share their hatred of the establishment. After all, the establishment had given me so many of my favorite things: Nick at Nite, the New York Knicks, Stephen King, Taco Bell, Green Day. The list went on and on."
"By the time I got to college I had stopped reading books because I wanted to "be cool" and started reading books simply because I wanted to read them. I discovered heroes like Roth, King, Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, TC Boyle, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, David Sedaris. These people weren't trying to "rebel against the literary establishment." They were trying to write great, high-quality books that were as entertaining and moving as possible."
"I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to."