T. C. Boyle Quotes
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My job is to engage, entertain, work out my life, tell a certain truth.
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The compulsively readable events of my life occurred mainly in infancy, and it's been pretty humdrum ever since.
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It's hard to say how certain stories just punch us in the heart and the brain at the same time at the end. I suppose that's what we're all looking for. But each story has its own valence, its own way of saying goodbye to you.
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I really like the power of stopping the laughter and turning it to horror.
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Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
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Science has killed religion. There's no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.
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Look at Sam Beckett. Most depressed man who ever lived, but he sure was funny.
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I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.
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I am a worrier. I worry about the state of our country, of the world, of our species. Every day seems to deliver a new nail to hammer into our collective coffin.
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I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.
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If we lose sight of the fact that writing is entertainment, then writing is doomed.
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I think that's what art is about: to provoke you. It helps me make sense of a senseless universe because I become the god of the story. I create it, and I see it in all its lineaments in my own way and can control it – in a world in which everything else is out of control.
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This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.
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This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.
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I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.
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I worry about everything in the world, and it's just too much for anybody to think about, so I have my art as my consolation.
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I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
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I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
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I describe myself as an environmentalist not because I'm marching in the street with placards but because I like to be in the woods by myself.
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As humans, we all want our own island. Of course, the truth is, we're never going to get it.
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It's just my natural way - to be funny. I don't know why that is. But as I've said, humor is a quick cover for shock, horror, confusion. The critics hate funny writers for the most part. They think funny is not serious, but I think that funny can be even more serious than nonfunny. And it can be more affecting, too.
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I tell jokes, and I have fun, but I tend to worry about everybody and everything throughout the entire world.
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The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
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What higher art does is to invite us in and allow us to make decisions.