Padgett Powell Quotes
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If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.
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I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.
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Heavy booze is a big time vacation, but you come back with a headache.
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I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.
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I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
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All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
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Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting.
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Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.
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I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
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I was a commercial roofer before this, until about age thirty. I will not work others under me and do not want to work under others.
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I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.
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Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
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Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?
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There's a lot of phones; but I'm out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there's not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.
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If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
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Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.
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That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.
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If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.