Charles Baxter Quotes
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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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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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When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.
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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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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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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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If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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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--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.
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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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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
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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.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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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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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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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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Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
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Everybody should customize their names.
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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.
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The astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.