99+ Charles Baxter Quotes on Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, Reality and The Feast of Love - Quotes.pub

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I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

You think that what I’ve told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

It’s my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She’s wreckage. It’s as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.

The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

When readers don’t like the book, it’s usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

The truth is that I’m never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I’m a malcontent and you can’t change that.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories. I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

You can’t reconstruct a story – you can’t even know what the story is – if everyone is saying, “Mistakes were made.” Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it’s history anyway, so let’s forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn’t have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you...

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

When I’m writing, I’m waiting to see somebody, and I’m waiting to hear them. It’s almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren’t real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

There’s nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves being gnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They are not mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. An acquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotional illness as “moth crazy.

The Feast of Love Quotes

To the beautiful falls the right of command, he observes, quoting Aristotle, although he adds that this situation is not always just.

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Quotes

Literature is not an instruction manual. For obvious reasons, this is rarely noted in fiction.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction Quotes

randomly around her plate. I said later: at least no ham, no pork, no shrimp mousse, no trayf. But Harry, she said, veal to me is like a frozen scream.

The Feast of Love Quotes

All that caring about what happens next.' He waited. 'Now nothing happens next.

There's Something I Want You to Do Quotes

I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.

Obligations Quotes Ruins Quotes There's Something I Want You to Do Quotes Wreckage Quotes

Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects,

The Feast of Love Quotes

If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.

The Feast of Love Quotes

Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes.

The Feast of Love Quotes

Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.

The Feast of Love Quotes

I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.

The Feast of Love Quotes

Do you read, Mr. Quinn?” he asked. “Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.

There's Something I Want You to Do Quotes

I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway.

The Feast of Love Quotes

He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.

There's Something I Want You to Do Quotes

So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another,

There's Something I Want You to Do Quotes

He only loved his love for me

The Feast of Love Quotes

and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue.

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Quotes

IN THE SMALL Ohio town where I grew up, many homes had parlors that contained pianos, sideboards, and sofas, heavy objects signifying gentility. These pianos were rarely tuned. They went flat in summer around the Fourth of July and sharp in winter at Christmas. Ours was a Story and Clark. On its music stand were copies of Stephen Foster and Ethelbert Nevin favorites, along with one Chopin prelude that my mother would practice for twenty minutes every three years. She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio—all of it, every scrap—made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything. Happiness is not infectious, but somehow her happiness infected my father, a pharmacist, and then spread through the rest of the household. My whole family was obstinately cheerful. I think of my two sisters, my brother, and my parents as having artificial, pasted-on smiles, like circus clowns. They apparently thought cheer and good Christian words were universals, respected everywhere. The pianos were part of this cheer. They played for celebrations and moments of pleasant pain. Or rather, someone played them, but not too well, since excellent playing would have been faintly antisocial. “Chopin,” my mother said, shaking her head as she stumbled through the prelude. “Why is he famous?

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories Quotes

He gave the impression of being clean and dry as though he had been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices.

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Quotes

As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction Quotes

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction Quotes

Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me.

Love Quotes / Death Quotes

As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don’t enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction Quotes

game of deducing a person’s character from that person’s appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority.

The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Quotes

Their souls are usually heavy and managerial.

Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction Quotes

Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again.

The Feast of Love Quotes

It didn't help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly...I kept telling him to get actual, that he'd died, and he'd say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I'd look at his hand that he held out, and I'd grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly like Oscar's, would startle me with terror and love, and I'd wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you've just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying.

Love Quotes / Death Quotes

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