William Maxwell Quotes

United States, Writer
August 16, 1908 – July, 31, 2000.

William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a legendary mentor and confidant to many of the most prominent authors of his day. Although best known as an editor, Maxwell was a highly respected and award-winning novelist and short story writer. His stature as a celebrated author has grown in the years following his death.

Also known as Editor, Novelist

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

William Maxwell
- Light
- Peace
- Happiness
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

William Maxwell

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

William Maxwell
My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.

William Maxwell
- Children
- Daughter
- Rooms
Your reader is at least as bright as you are

William Maxwell
- Literature
- Reader
If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

William Maxwell
- People
- Writing
- Deception
I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

William Maxwell
- Doors
- Leave
- Gone
Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

William Maxwell
- Reading
- Sides
- Rapture

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

William Maxwell
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters

William Maxwell