All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed. ~ on the friends we choose.

— Dave Eggers

Always we learn things and then we forget them.

— Dave Eggers

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

— Dave Eggers

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

— Dave Eggers

Dear Producers, Something is radiating deep within me, and it must be transmitted, or I will implode, and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet contoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due. I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy! Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing.

— Dave Eggers

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Honda's. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

— Dave Eggers

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

— Dave Eggers

Director of Ensuring the Future

— Dave Eggers

–Don’t you think the vast majority of the chaos in the world is caused by a relatively small group of disappointed men?–––I don’t know. Could be.–The men who haven’t gotten the work they expected to get. The men who don’t get the promotion they expected. The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mendacity and depravity and friends dying like animals. These men can’t be left to mix with the rest of society. Something bad always happens.

— Dave Eggers

Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.--After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

— Dave Eggers