4 Quotes & Sayings By Dt Max

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has written about the music industry, the life of Woody Allen, and Bill Clinton's presidency. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine , The Washington Post Book World, GQ , Rolling Stone , Salon.com , and many other publications. He is also the co-author of two books: the bestseller Invisible Man: A Biography , and a study of the literary phenomenon that was Kurt Vonnegut Read more

A native of Texas, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

1
Quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[ I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. D.T. Max
2
Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus. D.T. Max
3
When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: "Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I'm no pollyanna - this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don't often do it well. But I try.. Life is good. D.T. Max