Jess Walter Quotes
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He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.
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He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
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I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we're not really a culture geared to anything as humble as 'learning.' But I was disappointed in how quickly everyone wanted to get back to normal. It was as if we watched terrorism on TV for a while, then got bored and turned back to 'American Idol.'
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Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
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I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
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I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.
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This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
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The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
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I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.
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Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
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And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.
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You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.
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I come from a newspaper background, so maybe Im attuned to current events.
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I love humor in writing, so I've written to the thing that's funny, there's the joke, but then I just kept going. I started thinking about all the bikes I've had stolen, and that got me thinking about crime, and that got me thinking about the city I'm in.
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All we have is the story we tell.
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He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
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You have to do disappointment twice.
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And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?
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There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant — sail for Asia and stumble on America — and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.
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I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.
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All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!
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If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out.
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I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.
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Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.
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What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?
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There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.
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I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
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If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.
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No one gets to tell you what your life means!
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The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.
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