Jim Shepard Quotes

“You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”

— Jim Shepard

“What makes us threaten the things we want most?”

— Jim Shepard

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

— Jim Shepard

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

— Jim Shepard

Lately it's started to seem to me that here in America our fetishization of self-reliance has taken a wrong turn and has helped enable us to jettison compassion as a national value while still maintaining a vision of ourselves as essentially well-meaning. It hasn't taken a whole lot of common sense, given the evidence of the last few years, to puzzle out the heartlessness of unregulated capitalism, and yet our political class has embraced even more fervently the notion of every man for himself, even given the ever-growing numbers such a philosophy leaves behind.

— Jim Shepard

“She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.”

— Jim Shepard

“The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.”

— Jim Shepard

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

— Jim Shepard

“Christy has not been given a fair shake. She has not been identified as a competent premier,”

— Jim Shepard

“I think there's no question that historians create; they would tell you that, I think. If I'm trying to imagine an imperial Roman position, it's much easier to imagine the poor schlub who's not even sure why he's doing what he's doing than it is to imagine Caesar. At least for me. And I'm intrigued, too, by the position of the poor schlub who *still* finds himself supporting the imperial project.”

— Jim Shepard

“The protagonist of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours doesn't make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way of Rick Bass and Dennis Hopper, and self-presenting as yet another damaged romantic who thinks it's always time to play the cowboy, skating in and out of sense. He can't see right, and he's haunted by nearly everything. He's trying to open up or shut himself down or at least get a hold of himself. He's trying to make do with what he's done, while he reminds us that we're all, one way or another, in that position.”

— Jim Shepard

“I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.”

— Jim Shepard

“I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wanted to adopt Project X. Errol was a hoot. I loved talking with him. We were a good match, too, because we both kept joking that we'd found the only other person on earth more ambivalent than we were about the project.”

— Jim Shepard

“Empathy is a human trait. But lots of humans exercise some traits more energetically than others. By "the usefulness of empathy" I mean the way in which a progressive might claim that empathy is a crucial aspect of any benign political system, and the way a conservative might argue that not only is it not necessary, but it might not even be all that helpful, in that regard.”

— Jim Shepard

“I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.”

— Jim Shepard

I love the box that such a decision puts you in, and I love the interest the reader has in seeing how you negotiate that box: that seemingly hugely narrowed set of options. I also like the way in which it reminds us that we connect to the real world. That our relationship to the world matters.

— Jim Shepard

“Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly research teaches me about the world. Which often shows me the way, in terms of the story.”

— Jim Shepard

“I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself.”

— Jim Shepard

“I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it seems like it would make a good story.”

— Jim Shepard

“I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.”

— Jim Shepard

“Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.”

— Jim Shepard

“Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.”

— Jim Shepard

“Oh, I usually don't know a whole lot about a subject when I begin; the process itself teaches me a lot as I go along. Usually I know enough about one narrow area of the subject to start myself going, and then everything - including a lot more research - follows from that.”

— Jim Shepard

“I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.”

— Jim Shepard

“The etiquette of blurbs means it's not hard to not blurb something (if it's not by a friend, or student): everyone knows how many books you're deluged with. You can just say you never got to it.”

— Jim Shepard

“I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again.”

— Jim Shepard

I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

— Jim Shepard

“I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.”

— Jim Shepard