Matthew Klam quotes
Matthew Klam is an essayist who appears in a variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s, Nerve, and The New York Times Magazine. Klam is the author of the short story collection, Sam the Cat and Other Stories.
The freak show of the wedding was like a side thing: Madeleine Albright would be here tomorrow; Ruth Bader Ginsburg insisted on performing the ceremony; that advance team for Gore was trying to figure out whether the rain would hold off so Al could helicopter in for an appearance. What was I doing here? – New Yorker 1999, attending a posh wedding at an East Coast resort.
“This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaign blogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that the news agenda was beginning to be set by this largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers.” – NY Times Magazine post “Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail” September 2004
“Whatever it is that makes a person want to be famous, need to be famous — and not everything about a ravenous hunger for fame is bad…” – NY Times Magazine post “Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail” September 2004
“Short stories are like looking through a keyhole. A novel is a 360-degree panoramic window. It’s hard to keep the novel small. I think, now, when someone says that a novel is a “tour de force” it really means there’s too much crap in there. It’s hard to keep the novel small. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is right on the edge
of too much stuff. But I liked the novel.” – on the difference between a short story and a novel, 2001 interview with Colleen Curran.
“I think there is so much more out there that’s more interesting to write about than someone getting hold of a nuclear bomb and pointing it at the U.S. Men compensate for their angry nature with other men. It’s very complex. I’ve just learned how to be comfortable with other guys and enjoy them in the way I did in 5th grade. It’s hard to trust men because they’re untrustworthy. Men feel desperate about themselves, about their relationships with men, because they want to
succeed, they want life to look different. It’s all about forms of prowess, about a man’s facility within his own society. His physical, psychological strength. Demonstrations of power. It’s devastating, when men have problems with authority figures, they’re always seeking ways to play that out, to demonstrate their position.” – 2001 interview with Colleen Curran when asked about male/male relationships and writing about them.
