Dave Eggers Quotes

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

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.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

I grew up north of Chicago, not far from where the Schwinn bicycle plant used to be, and was conscious of the fact that these beautiful, everlasting bikes were made just down the road.

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.

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.

High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

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.

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.

But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.

But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.

But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.

Because I grew up with this naive expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation.

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.

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.

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.

And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.

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.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.