D.T. Max Quotes

United States, Writer
1984

D.T. Max is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery, which the New York Times Book Review called “gripping, cleanly written, cannily plotted and elegantly educational.”

Any good biography has to got to lead you to the work. Many biographers have started out in love with their subjects and ended up hating them.

D.T. Max
- Up
- Good
- Work
Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

D.T. Max
- Community
- Agreement
- Saws

Shock equals discovery, and if I narrated my past, you'd be pretty grossed out too, I bet - same as if you narrated yours. Aren't we all composed of our past mistakes? Isn't that part of emerging into an adult awareness of the world?

D.T. Max
- World
- Pretty
- Past
The truth is out there somewhere, but the dog needs to be walked.

D.T. Max
- Truth
- Needs
- Dog
I didn't go through anyone's garbage. People brought what they felt I needed to know to me.

D.T. Max
- People
- Needed
- Garbage
As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.

D.T. Max
People are always invoking evolutionary psychology for everything. "Why do men hang around asking women out? Oh, to improve their reproductive success," every damn thing - religion, art - it can all be explained by evolutionary psychology. But in our hearts we know that evolutionary psychology is only sort of accurate, because it really doesn't capture what's most interesting about our lives.

D.T. Max
- People
- Men
- Heart
Comfort and solace come about differently for different people.

D.T. Max
- People
- Different
- Comfort