Adam Haslett

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about. You try not to…

— Adam Haslett

“Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed…

— Adam Haslett

“I'm going to say this once,' he said, 'so you had better listen. You're twelve years old and you have a lot…

— Adam Haslett

“Everyone has nightmares. They're tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That's just how it is.”

— Adam Haslett

“Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you've got nowhere to go.”

— Adam Haslett

“I knew Michael had to be right about the argument that would come later because Mom didn’t say anything about us being…

— Adam Haslett

“He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like…

— Adam Haslett

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

— Adam Haslett

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway…

— Adam Haslett

“What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never…

— Adam Haslett

“Rasca a un altruista y verás sangrar a un hipócrita.”

— Adam Haslett

“You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just…

— Adam Haslett

“It was one of those youthful promises that you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are…

— Adam Haslett

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to…

— Adam Haslett

“I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope…

— Adam Haslett

“...even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We're not individuals. We're haunted by…

— Adam Haslett

Discovery is the joy.

— Adam Haslett

“The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.”

— Adam Haslett

“This is the thing I have discovered: Michael's being gone doesn't mean we stop trying to save him. The strain is less…

— Adam Haslett

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want…

— Adam Haslett

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

— Adam Haslett

“Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the…

— Adam Haslett

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I…

— Adam Haslett

“It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the…

— Adam Haslett

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the…

— Adam Haslett