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. – Dave Eggers
I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
I’m interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic. – Dave Eggers
When I’m doing work online or on the computer, it’s one thing. When I want to read, I want to go elsewhere, and I want to be away from the screen. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody. – Dave Eggers
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization. – Dave Eggers
Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
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. – Dave Eggers
It’s not that our family has no taste, it’s just that our family’s taste is inconsistent. – Dave Eggers
But you know, there’s something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention – they go home, they’re finished. They don’t stall, they don’t do their homework in front of the TV. – Dave Eggers
I think newspapers shouldn’t try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. – Dave Eggers
You know, it’s been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. – Dave Eggers
Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation. – Dave Eggers
