William Maxwell Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

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

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).

Your reader is at least as bright as you are

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.

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.

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.

I am the cat that walks alone.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much...But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.

The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet

It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.

Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.