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.
From John Jeremiah Sullivan
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.
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.
Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives