Charles Baxter Quotes

38 quotes in 581 categories

• Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures…
• What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice…
• 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. You…
• Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.
• 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, or…
• When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
• My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
• Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
• At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
• Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for…
• There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry,…
• When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
• What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
• Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day…
• The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong…
• A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of…
• Literature is not an instruction manual.
• What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice…
• You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.
• You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

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