Charles Baxter Quotes
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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
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I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
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When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.
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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.
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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.
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It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.
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In February, the overcast sky isn’t gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It’s a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you’re inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.
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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.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.
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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.
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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.
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
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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.
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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.
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There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
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There is no weather in malls.
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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.
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
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Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
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In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.
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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.
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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.
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What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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