Charles Baxter Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
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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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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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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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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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Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
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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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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.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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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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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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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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Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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There is no weather in malls.
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As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.
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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.