Writing
O'Rourke was a proponent of Gonzo journalism; one of his earliest and best-regarded pieces was "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink", a National Lampoon article in March 1979. The article was republished in two of his books, Republican Party Reptile (1987) and Driving Like Crazy (2009).
O'Rourke's best-received book is Parliament of Whores, subtitled A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, whose main argument, according to the author, "is that politics are boring".
O'Rourke has described himself as a libertarian. He has sarcastically proposed two other American political parties: one for those with his mixture of views, another for those who hold the opposite mixture.
O'Rourke types his manuscripts on an IBM Selectric typewriter, though denies that he is a Luddite, asserting that his short attention span would make focusing on writing on a computer difficult. In a January 2007 interview, O'Rourke gave an example of his view of computers and writing by referencing novelist Stephen King, whom he paraphrased – saying had he a computer, he could have written three times as much in his early days. To which O'Rourke remarked, "Does the world need three times as many Cujos? Three times as many Jane Austens, maybe."
Read more about this topic: P. J. O'Rourke
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“In the course of writing one historical book or another, it has happened that I could hardly restrain myself from simply copying entire documents. Indeed, I sometimes sank down among the documents and said to myself, I can’t improve on these.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)
“The big toad sits in my writing room
preventing me from writing. I am a flower
who dries out under her hot breath.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ...”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)