Dave Eggers Quotes

There's always something personal, no matter how big or small the story is.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along.

I never leave a piece of theater that I love and say, 'That was a good point; They made a good point.' I leave, and I feel something.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

A good song should give you a lot of images; you should be able to make your own little movie in your head to a good song.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

'MotherFatherSon' was just an extraordinary read and I wanted to be a part of it.

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it's a personal thing.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

The plot is very important because writers have to play fair with their readers, but no one would care about the plot if the character work wasn't there. So, basically every book I work on starts with me thinking not just about the bad thing that's going to happen, but how that bad thing is going to ripple through the community, the family of the victim, and the lives of the investigators. I am keenly aware when I'm working that the crimes I am writing about have happened to real people. I take that very seriously.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

People like to say that Plutarch's is a really "personal" voice, but in truth Plutarch tells us very little about his life. His voice is personable but never personal. It feels intimate because he's addressing the world as we experience it, at this level, a human level, rather than way up here where very few of us live.

Because the life that I live - the life that we all live - is filtered through [one's own] experience. It isn't necessarily optimistic when you look at the political phenomena, the different things that are going on in the world.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

I had self-doubt about whether my story was interesting to people. I didn't want to write something that was anecdotal. It was important to me that people would get something out of my book. I want people to read it and say, "Now I don't feel so alone," or "I'm going to remember that next time I'm being an asshole."

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.