Charles Baxter Quotes - Page 2

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

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.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

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.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

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.

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.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

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.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

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.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

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.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.