Robert Olen Butler

The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.

— Robert Olen Butler

“If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That,…

— Robert Olen Butler

“Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do…

— Robert Olen Butler

The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into…

— Robert Olen Butler

Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily…

— Robert Olen Butler

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the…

— Robert Olen Butler

Jayne Anne Phillips . . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is…

— Robert Olen Butler

“And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture…

— Robert Olen Butler

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

— Robert Olen Butler

In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless…

— Robert Olen Butler

We are the yearning creatures of this planet.

— Robert Olen Butler

“I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on…

— Robert Olen Butler

“And William says, "I lost one son utterly."... ..."So I've held my tongue. But the truth is you didn't go to war.…

— Robert Olen Butler

“The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal…

— Robert Olen Butler

“When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity,…

— Robert Olen Butler

Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

— Robert Olen Butler

“The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look…

— Robert Olen Butler

“I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, “It’s so effing…

— Robert Olen Butler