Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11. — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
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… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved,… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters. — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
“Literature is not an instruction manual. For obvious reasons, this is rarely noted in fiction.” — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
“Gurov, discovers that the most important features of life that you want to talk about cannot be spoken of in polite society.” — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
“Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her. — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
“Anyway, what I've just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.” — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
“intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.” — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world.… — Charles Baxter Copy Share Image
