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Jim Shepard Biography

Jim Shepard (born 1956) is an American novelist and short story writer, who teaches creative writing and film at Williams College.

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Jim Shepard Quotes

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.

Clay, Distance, Playfulness, Think, Thinking, Way

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.

Organically, Planning, Tends, Thinking, Way

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.

Emotional, Good, Imagination, Like, Stories

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

Genius, Greater, Instinct, Intuition, Turns

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.

American, Class, Considered, Media, Race

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.

Imagine, Imperial, Poor, Supporting, Thinking, Trying

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.

Cowboy, Hannah, Hes, Self, Stories, Thinking

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.

Aspect, Exercise, Human, Mean, Political

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.

Boys, Head, Rote, Unhappy, Unseen

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

Like, People, Writers

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

Fiction, Read, Reading, Spend, Want

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.

Character, Huge, Moving, Netherlands, Story, Understanding

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

Things, Threaten, Want

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.

Directors, Found, Kept, Movie, Talking, Thinking

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.

Commitment, Devalue, Empathy, Enhanced, Ideology, Thinking

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.

Assistants, Empathetic, Example, Like, Trying

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.

Blurb, Blurbs, Book, Hard, Mean, Students

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

Christy, Fairs, Given, Identified, Shake, Shakes