My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of – the Western canon is here, and it’s gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
Anything where I get to write a lot of jokes and have a lot of creative control – that’s all I want. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
My parents are both pastors. In the ’80s and ’90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman – especially a married woman and a mother – to be a pastor. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
It’s so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don’t care. I love writing in bed. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
Usually, the first thing I do when I wake up is I start working, so I often won’t start the day by reading anything because I like to minimize my ‘commute’ as much as possible. I wake up, open my laptop and start working in bed. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
After I do my first writing of the day, I will generally look at Twitter and Google News – and that’s my big media secret. I look at Twitter and I look at Google because they pull all the headlines from other websites. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
I’m on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It’s great for jokes. But when I’m writing, I can’t do anything else. I can’t even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can’t multitask. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
I’m really not a journalist, and I don’t do a ton of newsy pieces. Occasionally I’ll write about something that’s going on recently, but I really don’t do a ton of stuff that’s tied to current events. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski. Daniel Mallory Ortberg Read Quote
