Jess Walter

“Being alive isn't the same thing as living”

— Jess Walter

You have to do disappointment twice.

— Jess Walter

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

— Jess Walter

All we have is the story we tell.

— Jess Walter

“Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.”

— Jess Walter

What business does memory have with time?

— Jess Walter

The form is so malleable and can do so many things.

— Jess Walter

No one gets to tell you what your life means!

— Jess Walter

“Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.”

— Jess Walter

What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?

— Jess Walter

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

— Jess Walter

I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.

— Jess Walter

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

— Jess Walter

“Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

— Jess Walter

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think…

— Jess Walter

He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

— Jess Walter

“Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that…

— Jess Walter

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't…

— Jess Walter

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what…

— Jess Walter

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

— Jess Walter

“This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel,…

— Jess Walter

There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant…

— Jess Walter

If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're…

— Jess Walter

“And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of…

— Jess Walter

Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist…

— Jess Walter

“„Listen,” Richard says, „unless you're about to inherit some money, what we're talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola,…

— Jess Walter

“A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was…

— Jess Walter

“I don't know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like…

— Jess Walter

I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we're not really a culture geared to anything as humble as…

— Jess Walter

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

— Jess Walter

I think so, too. I know I felt that way. For years. It was as if I was a character in a…

— Jess Walter

“Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from…

— Jess Walter

“IN THE NINE YEARS since the standoff at Ruby Ridge and in the six years since this book first appeared, much has…

— Jess Walter

“But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos--…

— Jess Walter

“Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church,…

— Jess Walter

“To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it…

— Jess Walter

“This is a love story,” Michael Dean says, ”but really what isn’t? Doesn’t the detective love the mystery or the chase, or…

— Jess Walter

“(…) met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter…

— Jess Walter

“Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge…

— Jess Walter

“YOU CAN SEE FOR MILES in both directions from the point on Ruby Ridge. From here, the paths of the Weaver family…

— Jess Walter