The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn’t green – the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It’s that the greenness doesn’t mean what it seems. It doesn’t encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
It is a curious fact that the word ‘essayist’ showed up in English before it existed in French. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
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. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the ‘Paris Review’ and places. They’re all acting. It’s like watching a person in a play. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
There’s a half-conscious state you enter when you’re actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it’s the only place where you even are a writer. John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Quote
