Joshua Ferris quotes

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense. (Joshua Ferris)
Without work, so much of one's identity just evaporates. View quote
Joshua Ferris
Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts. View quote
Joshua Ferris
Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night. View quote
Joshua Ferris
To conform is to lose your soul. View quote
Joshua Ferris
All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making. View quote
Joshua Ferris
My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game. View quote
Joshua Ferris
We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I've always thought things were absurd. It would take a lot more effort for me to see things as reasonable. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I come from a very illustrious line of divorces. We love to get divorced in my family. My mother and father have been married four times each - eight ceremonies with the best of intentions. (Joshua Ferris)
After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office. View quote
Joshua Ferris
We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I don't write directly on to the computer because I don't think well facing forward with fingers on a keyboard. I think better looking down holding a pen. And the concentration quotient of pen and paper is higher than when I'm moving words around on screen. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership. View quote
Joshua Ferris
The office is a romantic enabler because you're always around the person you have a crush on. There's no escape from, and maybe no desire to escape from, those pressure-cooker conditions. And there's an automatic series of things you have to talk about all the time. View quote
Joshua Ferris
One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion. View quote
Joshua Ferris
Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me. View quote
Joshua Ferris
Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable. View quote
Joshua Ferris
Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience. (Joshua Ferris)
It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns. View quote
Joshua Ferris
We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war. View quote
Joshua Ferris
I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment." View quote
Joshua Ferris
I think one of the ways you avoid being angry is to avoid being angry at the people in power. They might do crappy things, and piss you off, and make bad decisions, but they shouldn't be hated simply because they're in power. And I thought it was important to humanize them if the book was going to be even-handed to all the different ways you encounter people at work. View quote
Joshua Ferris