Scott McClanahan Quotes

Everybody is so sure about everything these days. Just look at your horrible Facebook feed on the most recent tragedy that people are commenting on.

The whole exploitation thing is funny, too. Exploitation is the nature of the world, isn't it?

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out unscathed or scathed.

It's like that where these little anecdotes come through, and I guess that's what I like about books like that [He Stopped Loving Her Today]. Fiction now is so experiential.

I think maybe it's my personality. People don't like my face.

Everybody is so goddamn sure of themselves, it just makes you realize this is the curse of the modern world.

New York exists for me. Not me for it.

Fellini is a just a province kid. Rome exists for Fellini, not the other way around.

Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. Mark Twain is Mark Twain. He doesn't become the thing until he creates himself.

I think all good art is outsider art.

There was a lot of tension between my dad and his mother and brothers. Sometimes when I was over there, I remember thinking, "I don't want to get shot."

We like something because someone else liked it.

This [Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original] is another one of those books with the perfect blend of anecdote and analysis. The analysis is built into the anecdote. It has that right feel about it. It's not too scholarly, either.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

You can write songs about your comic books and the girl or boy you sort of know and your mom and dad and it's all right there in front of you.

Writing should be like skirts. Long enough to cover what it needs to cover and short enough to maintain interest.

In memoir, can you really tell the truth about yourself? You're not going to write about your little peccadilloes, like, "I like a finger in my ass during sex." Or whatever it is. You're not going to come out in typical everyday conversation and say that. That's something that's going to be only for a select few.

Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are usually the books you see on display at Barnes and Noble. These Internet writers are like literary terrorists to me. They're training as we speak. They're getting ready to invade. They're building an army.

Only cool people care about the origin stories of why they like something, and I'm not cool.

I'm shocked and surprised by people that are shocked and surprised that certain things in life are made up or not as true as you might believe them to be.

I think a pretty good modus operandi is to believe that everything we know is wrong. The stomach will be the key to depression or consciousness or we'll realize ants are smarter than people.

[He Stopped Loving Her Today] is all about the experience of being alive and the thought process of consciousness, and then you have these polemical essay-type things going on for a couple decades now. Some of these music books are where you're going to see an anecdote of a person behaving without some kind of commentary.

With my stuff, I think I've tried. I've been courted. I don't want to sound like an asshole, but I've been courted to be someone who could sell a lot of books.

Most of the answers to the world could be answered with our bodies.

I guess the things I have always loved are from people who were just being themselves. They were doing these things because they couldn't do it any other way. It was for them.

We're artists. We cry out to be exploited on some level. Write a dissertation on my work. Write a biography about me.

I have no interest in being a trained ballerina. People should dance how they want to dance. I want to be the funky chicken.

I don't think anybody does anything anymore without commenting on why they're doing it or making fun of it as they're doing it.

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting.

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" a fascinating book about the making of a record. Really, to be honest, it has some of the best George Jones anecdotes I've ever read, like cocaine psychosis causing this personality called "the Duck."

The only hope we have are our bodies. We're all trapped in them and we all hate them, and it's this reason why we're comic and not tragic.

There's always tons of crap music people are trying to sell us - [it's] the same way with publishers and galleries.

I'm sure we're going to find out one day that the brain is as worthless as the appendix.

It's weird. People want you to know that they write. They want you to know they're a musician, rather than making music or making stories. It's the strangest thing.

Fashion costs money, but songs are free. You can write them for free and you can sing them for free and they can infect those around you or the people from the future and they can sing them for free too.