American - Writer | October 17, 1961 -
I love the nooks and crannies of the American landscape; the back roads and back alleys, the places that are still untouched by the corporate gloss, the veneer of sameness that seems to be spreading across the country.
David Means
LoveRoadsAmericanLandscapeBack
Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.
CultureEndGenerationWayNever
Americans are pragmatic; we want quick, clean, simple solutions to vast problems. The paradox is that we're a deeply confessional culture, but we're not often contemplative.
CultureSimpleProblemsWantClean
I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.
TimeWarSisterLongKnowLong Time
Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.
WarPresidentTraumaSameUpPart
I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say.
WorkStoryYouSaidSayWant
There's a huge distance between who I am as a regular person and what takes place in my fiction.
I AmPlaceDistancePersonFiction
It's better to know your story than not to know.
StoryBetterKnowYourThan
I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they're highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.
LoveWayMoreHardAnythingSharp
Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue - some even start that way - and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news.
RideStartGivingNewsKnowWay
I'm not at all interested in simply reporting what's here right now, or cranking out an entertainment device that's going to touch the widest number of people. I'm interested in digging and excavating as deep as I can go into those small eternal moments and how they expand out, or close in, on the lives of my characters.
PeopleSmallDeepMomentsI CanGo
As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing.
WorkLoveSmallStoryCareTools
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