Dan Kennedy
The New York novelist, comedy writer, and host of The Moth, has authored only the three books of humour and fiction referenced below.
Dan Kennedy is an American writer living in New York and host of The Moth storytelling podcast. He is the author of three books: "Loser Goes First" (Random House, 2004), "Rock On" (Algonquin, 2008), and "American Spirit: A Novel" (Amazon/Houghton Mifflin, 2013). A widely anthologized humorist, Kennedy first became popular as a columnist on McSweeney's dot net and as a performer of various comedic readings in downtown New York clubs. He tours occasionally, and often performs in and hosts events for The Moth, a storytelling collective founded in 1997 by novelist George Dawes Green (The Juror, Ravens).
“Today when I was walking down an endless maze of white picket fences back to the train station, a little boy playing in his front yard runs up to the fence and looks at me...looks at me with eyes that take it all in...maybe he will say,'Start writing. On the train. Tonight. In that gay little journal you carry around with you. It's what you naturally do, ever since the sixth grade, except this time it will be notes for this book. You'll be like a huge 33 year old goony sixth grader with a book deal writing on some lame ass commuter train. Now Go! Go on!'Whatever he says, he will deliver the message that all of us have lost the ability to say in our jaded adult lives. Maybe how our lives finally change but only when it is right for our lives to change. That we are not in control of this thing. I look back at him just before making my turn on the last part of my walk toward the train. It feels like slow motion as he sizes me up that one last time. He opens his mouth and the words come out: 'Hey mister, why dont you have a car?'Oh, man.”
Dan Kennedy
“On the TV screen right now, it's 1975, and Jimmy Page is playing like a man who answers to nobody. A man existing in that seductive state of extended adolescence that rock legends bask in, a man connected to something in the universe larger than even the sum total of the legendary Led Zeppelin, playing guitar because that is so clearly what he was put here to do. And it's wrong to expect that kind of divine moment to last forever, and to expect an artist to stay in 1975. Fact is, ten minutes ago I saw the guy onscreen right downstairs, coming off the trading floor of the stock exchange with a banker carrying his guitar cases for him. I sit cross-legged on the floor on a workday staring into my cereal bowl, thinking about how we all change. We all grow up. We all move on, one way or another, whether we want to or not.”
Dan Kennedy
“For me, I think it was a little easier to write thinking that nobody was listening.”
Dan Kennedy
“I spent a long time writing in obscurity. You'll spend a long time writing in obscurity. ”
Dan Kennedy