Padgett Powell

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have…

— Padgett Powell

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

— Padgett Powell

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

— Padgett Powell

I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The…

— Padgett Powell

“the zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to denigrate the…

— padgett powell

Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.

— Padgett Powell

“don't hesitate to insulate your house, especially the floor.”

— Padgett Powell

“ease up. the day was rued when we came upon it, or when it came upon us, and beheld us marring the…

— Padgett Powell

“apply shingles from the bottom up.”

— Padgett Powell

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,

— Padgett Powell

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

— Padgett Powell

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech,…

— Padgett Powell

“A whole section of the family tree is pruned and primped and assessed as I politely sit there. Overall, I detect that…

— Padgett Powell

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now…

— Padgett Powell

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

— Padgett Powell

“She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people…

— Padgett Powell

“If the observation were made to you that "Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind…

— Padgett Powell

“But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling -- there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable,…

— Padgett Powell

“the new world may be in fact a very, very, very, very old world.”

— Padgett Powell

“try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and…

— Padgett Powell

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big…

— Padgett Powell

“You can't disturb a nobody with evidence he's a nobody. A nobody is not disturbed by anything significant.”

— Padgett Powell

“disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness”

— Padgett Powell

“in the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely.”

— Padgett Powell

“Have you decided yet what historical moment you would have most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?”

— Padgett Powell