And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions…

For many people it's Facebook, or sports on TV, whatever it is. I have my own demons that I battle. But whatever they are,…

— Jess Walter

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how…

— Jess Walter

“What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough?”

— Jess Walter

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction,…

— Jess Walter

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to…

— Jess Walter

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the…

— Jess Walter

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a…

— Jess Walter

“A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.”

— Jess Walter

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

— Jess Walter

“And Pasquale forced himself to look away from her then. It was like prying a magnet off steel, but he did it: he turned…

— Jess Walter

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

— Jess Walter

I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a…

— Jess Walter

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.

— Jess Walter

Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't…

— Jess Walter

“How do you think it should end?” Young Pasquale considered the question. “Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could…

— Jess Walter