Brian Morton Quotes
You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It’s like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.
Brian Morton
Quotes to Explore
The desire to learn from people was always bound up with the desire to seem special to them.
Brian Morton
So much of human life is animal life: we respond to each other as animals.
Brian Morton
The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.
Brian Morton
...life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of a new life.
Brian Morton
Let’s listen again to Dencombe: 'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.' I love the fact that he uses the word 'passion' and the word 'task' in the same sentence—the one so exalted, the other so commonplace. More than this, I love that he equates them. Our passion is our task. To follow the calling of art, to keep faith with it, to continue with your daily labors despite the frustrations, the distractions, and the other varieties of madness that will inevitably beset you—all this requires passion, but it also requires something else, something more down-to-earth. Call it steeliness. Call it persistence. Call it tenacity. Call it resilience. Call it devotion.
Whatever you decide to call it, the ability to consecrate yourself to the daily task of art isn’t rooted in madness. As James knew, as Dencombe knew, it’s rooted in sanity.
Brian Morton
These friends were his anchor; they kept him from floating off into the uncharted realms of his own self-regard.
Brian Morton
The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.
Brian Morton
“Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I’d be a better daughter for him than she is.
Brian Morton
One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it’s become like the movie business, where a movie has to “open big”; if a book hasn’t caught anybody’s interest in the first two weeks of its life, it’s not going to.
Brian Morton
It wasn’t that she wanted to seduce him—not literally. But flirting was a pleasure, and flirting with intelligent people—male or female—was one of the supreme pleasures of life.
Brian Morton
But Ariel felt sure that every moment is indestructible, and that somewhere in the universe, tucked away in some hidden fold of time, their moment together still endured. Somewhere she was still a young girl, hurled about by life, confessing her troubles, and he was a calm older man, listening to her as her father couldn’t listen and telling her to have courage.
Brian Morton
Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers...
Brian Morton
People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?
Brian Morton
And we were driving there with Florence and Stella. I was complaining about having to go all the way up to Connecticut, and you said, ‘Look at it this way: we have two obligations to our old friends. We have to go to their weddings and we have to go to their funerals. With George, we’re halfway home.
Brian Morton
He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time.
Brian Morton
Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.
Brian Morton
The parasite of art, the virus of art, never ceases to gnaw awat at your brain, never ceases to torture you with the knowledge that whatever you’re doing could be done more beautifully, more powerfully, more stirringly, more disturbingly, more deeply.
Brian Morton
You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It’s like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.
Brian Morton
