Stewart O'Nan Quotes

14 quotes in 245 categories

• Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and…
• When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk,…
• All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they're true or invented, legend or fact.
• The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.
• I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find…
• The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
• To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might…
• The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
• You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world,…
• As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.
• If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.
• The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
• No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.
• Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.

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