Allan Gurganus

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep…

— Allan Gurganus

“The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe…

— Allan Gurganus

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.

— Allan Gurganus

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

— Allan Gurganus

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object.…

— Allan Gurganus

“He, the true writer, is the department store dummy at the very center of the whole establishment, the one left alone on…

— Allan Gurganus

“Lord-Express have mercy on our stop-making, stuttering local. Place me expressly beyond these stares, past such terrible embarrassment. I say I do…

— Allan Gurganus

“The chances of achieving literary performance are, to the decimal point, the odds against becoming fully human. That means one hundred and…

— Allan Gurganus

“Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of eve none of mine. A huge bronze…

— Allan Gurganus

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

— Allan Gurganus

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

— Allan Gurganus

“We'd die here, old together, safe with each other's secrets. We were each other's juvenilia”

— Allan Gurganus

“Fifteen, that’s the age when the only world event that counts is whatever mood you’re in that day.”

— Allan Gurganus

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was…

— Allan Gurganus

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

— Allan Gurganus

“Once you harden, the arteries do.”

— Allan Gurganus

“How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks…

— Allan Gurganus

“All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what…

— Allan Gurganus