"And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing"
About this Quote
The throwaway casualness is the point: a small domestic detail that signals an entire sensibility. Augusten Burroughs isn’t bragging about his taste so much as positioning himself in a recognizable cultural weather system. “NPR” functions as shorthand for a certain kind of literate calm - voices trained to sound reasonable, stories packaged as humane, information delivered with the soft authority of tote bags and pledge drives. For a memoirist whose work often thrives on mess, dysfunction, and emotional voltage, that calm reads like ballast.
The sly move is the clause that follows: “when I’m not writing.” Writing, in Burroughs-land, is an activity intense enough to demand its own soundscape or silence; NPR belongs to the off-hours, the decompression chamber. It suggests a boundary between the feral interior of the page and the managed exterior of daily life. That separation is a craft note disguised as lifestyle trivia: writers curate inputs. They’re picky about what gets into the bloodstream when the work isn’t actively being made.
There’s subtext, too, about belonging. Dropping NPR in a sentence is a social signal - not elitist exactly, but legible to a particular class of American self-conception: curious, slightly anxious, allergic to shouting. Burroughs, whose persona often courts transgression, uses that signal to complicate the brand. The anecdote says: yes, I can write the chaos; no, I don’t have to live in it 24/7.
The sly move is the clause that follows: “when I’m not writing.” Writing, in Burroughs-land, is an activity intense enough to demand its own soundscape or silence; NPR belongs to the off-hours, the decompression chamber. It suggests a boundary between the feral interior of the page and the managed exterior of daily life. That separation is a craft note disguised as lifestyle trivia: writers curate inputs. They’re picky about what gets into the bloodstream when the work isn’t actively being made.
There’s subtext, too, about belonging. Dropping NPR in a sentence is a social signal - not elitist exactly, but legible to a particular class of American self-conception: curious, slightly anxious, allergic to shouting. Burroughs, whose persona often courts transgression, uses that signal to complicate the brand. The anecdote says: yes, I can write the chaos; no, I don’t have to live in it 24/7.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Augusten
Add to List
