A biography for Daniel Mallory Ortberghasn’t been written yet.
“My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of - the Western canon is here, and it's gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy.”
“I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.”
“With a few exceptions, birds are not to be trusted; it is not normal to have such soft, vulnerable bodies bookended with slashing beaks and razor-sharp claws. It is as unnatural as an armed marshmallow.”
“I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.”
“A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.”
“Ghost! I miss him! Is that weird? I miss him even though I invented him. I feel a lot of tenderness toward him. I don't write a lot of stuff that is sad or that is tender and affectionate, so that has a very special place in my heart.”
“I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask.”
“My parents are both pastors. In the '80s and '90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman - especially a married woman and a mother - to be a pastor.”
“One of the things that would be great is to some day have so many women comedy writers that we wouldn't say there's just one type of female humor. There's lots.”
“I read my first P.G. Wodehouse when I was 12.”
“My credentials, briefly: I no longer go to church or believe in God, but I can still name every one of the fruits of the Spirit and reeled for days upon hearing the announcement that Audio Adrenaline was reunited with one of the singers from DC Talk.”
“I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.”
“When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.”
“It certainly was unusual growing up with two fairly well-known pastors as my parents.”
“Humor is always more interesting when it comes from someone who's had more than, like, five experiences.”
“I spent the first 22 years of my life absorbing everything, like a big disgusting cell, and now I'm disgorging it with jokes added out into the world. That's a really gross metaphor.”
“It's so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don't care. I love writing in bed.”
“I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will... I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom.”
“The Toast's audience is about 30-35 percent male, which shocked me because I would say that we actively try to discourage men from reading our site. Apparently, there's not insignificant number of dudes out there who think that what we are doing is okay.”