35 Quotes by Jonathan Dee

I mean she’s not exactly a complex figure. You can look at her and pretty much imagine what that whole relationship was like. She’s like a dog. One bit of kindness and she’s so grateful she forgets about what happened a minute ago.

She wanted to find his limit, because knowing that limit would drive a wedge between them; but in his mind, the question was not how far he would go but how far he would follow her, and she couldn’t find the limit to that.

I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.

Don't get me wrong: I can and do waste time on the Internet with the best of them, but in some respects, I am an embarrassingly analog guy. I am not on Facebook. I write whole books on yellow legal pads. I do not own a cell phone.

John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.

In order to describe a particular subculture, you might want to portray people who are typical or representative of that subculture; but to dramatize it, to make it an interesting setting for a story, you want to bring someone anomalous into that setting, to see how she conforms to it, and it to her.

It's nice to have something else going on when a book comes out so you're not just sitting by the phone, waiting for things to happen. You don't want to be the guy Googling himself all day.

Tween programming is so retro that the shows even have theme songs, something the quest for more commercial time drove out of prime-time television years ago.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.