Novelists From The United States

"I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and.... well... it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess. When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to make something much, much better. I wanted to write something that was pretty much the opposite of that first novel. Also, I read Cyrano De Bergerac, right before I started writing the book. Cyrano's character reminded me of some important things, namely, what it really means to be a tragic hero. You don't need a lot of the cliché fantasy trappings to have that cool character. I also read Giacomo Casanova's memoirs soon after starting this project. That opened my eyes to how interesting an autobiography could be, provided the person telling it has a way with words and has lived a sufficiently adventurous life...."

"I remember sitting down once, [at] three in the morning and probably the only person awake in Stevens Point [...] *imitates typing with his fingers* And I stop, and I think: "This is crap! I've spent years of my life writing crap. This will never be published - it isn't good... I've wasted years of my life!" *shrugs and types on* You do it because you like the process. I mean... you write because you like to write."

"“How do they feel about demons off in Atur?” he asked. “Scared.” My father tapped his temple. “All that religion makes their brains soft.”"

"Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don’t get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That’s a story. Handled properly, it’s more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be."

"There is only one Whedon, and I am his prophet."

"Mauthen ain’t much for listenen. Nothin’ plugs a man’s ears like money."

"Nothing makes a man feel older than a young woman."

"Wilem tapped Simmon’s shoulder. “He’s telling the truth.” Simmon glanced over at him. “Why do you say that?” “He sounds more sincere than that when he lies.”"

"Like all boys my age, I was an idiot when it came to women."

"She looked at me. Looked away. “You think too much of me.” I smiled. “Perhaps you think too little of yourself.”"

"“Trouble,” he chuckled. “What does a boy like you know about trouble? I was in trouble afore you were born. I been in trouble you don’t even got words for.”"

"“Music is a fine thing, but metal lasts.” He struck the table with two huge fingers to emphasize his point.... As I left, I thought about what Kilvin had said. It was the first thing he had said to me that I did not agree with wholeheartedly. Metal rusts, I thought, music lasts forever. Time will eventually prove one of us right."

"“Piss on etiquette,” Threpe said petulantly. “Etiquette is a set of rules people use so they can be rude to each other in public.”"

"As my father used to say: “There are two sure ways to lose a friend, one is to borrow, the other to lend.”"

"Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack."

"Everyone thinks chemistry and alchemy are so similar, but they’re really not. They’re not even related. They just happen to live in the same house."

"Upon him I will visit famine and a fire. Till all around him desolation rings And all the demons in the outer dark Look on amazed and recognize That vengeance is the business of a man."

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."

"“Why do we stop for the greystones?” “Tradition, my boy,” he said grandly, throwing his arms wide. “And superstition. They are one and the same, anyway.”"

"Any student of mine must be able to defend his ideas against an attack. No matter how you spend your life, your wit will defend you more often than a sword. Keep it sharp!"

"Plainly said, he was giving me enough rope to hang myself with. Apparently he didn’t realize that once a noose is tied, it will fit one neck as easily as another."

"The truth was, I needed to impress them. I knew from my previous discussions with Ben that you needed money or brains to get into the University. The more of one you had, the less of the other you needed."

"Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear."

"Nobles’ sons are one of nature’s great destructive forces, like floods or tornadoes. When you’re struck with one of these catastrophes, the only thing an average man can do is grit his teeth and try to minimize the damage."

"“All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.”"

"But for most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans."

"My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you’re lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day. The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind even after all these years."

"My father had a dark glimmer in his eye as he moved behind her. “Old?” He spoke in a low voice as he began to rub her shoulders again. “Woman, I have a mind to prove you wrong.” She smiled a wry smile. “Sir, I have a mind to let you.”"

"“You’re just getting old.” She gave a dramatic sigh. “Truly, all the more’s the tragedy; the second thing to go is a man’s memory.”"

"Remember this son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart. And, some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly, no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens."

"Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?"

"The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket."

"He was my neighbor and a true friend. This kind of friend. One day in 1973 he crossed the street to talk to me on my stoop. "Grace," he said, "you now have enough stories for a book." (My last book had been published in 1959.) "Are you sure? I kind of doubt it," I said. "No, you do-go on upstairs and see what you can find in your files-I know I'm right." I spent a week or so extracting stories from folders. He looked at my list at dinner at his house. "You're missing at least two more," he said. "You've got to find them now. I'll wait here." Many others have stories about that kindness to colleagues. We had a sad political parting, which lasted about a year after the 1986 New York International PEN Conference. He considered his position long-term, overriding that year's key speaker. He thought me disloyal and was angry. I was never angry at him, partly because political opposition is more natural to me, but mostly because I never didn't love his fine tragic heart and brilliant work. He smoked and drank in the manner of American writers (his only untransformed cliché) and died of the cancerous sorrow of these addictions. His very breath which made those perfect sentences tormented then broken."

"He was, according to students, an extraordinary teacher, rigorous, picky, not mean-but a teaser. Sometimes. "What did he really mean by that?" a student whispered to me once when I visited his class. "You can write anything you want but you may not mention the weather," he told his classes at City College in New York and at the University of Houston. The weather, the very geography of platitude. Still, he knew about those easy clichés. He knew their ancient usefulness and perseverance. He grabbed them, gave them a good half turn to laugh a social truth into a sentence-he was certainly a sentence maker."

"If you were a female person, it's perfectly true that he'd often meet you with a sort of attentive bossiness, which is the Southern male's ingrained behavior with women. It was really an awful pain in the neck. A regional problem and serious."

"Don's imagination had spent some time living alongside the arts of painting, architecture, philosophy, music. Then he added a journalistic interest in the day-I mean the immediate morning-to-night American day. His language, invented along a syntactical line between Texas and New York. The fact is, he could have been only clever, and he was clever, but his intelligence ran harder and deeper than his wit. He was in his life and work a citizen. That means he paid attention to and argued the life of his street, his city (New York or Houston), his country. He never played a game of literary personalities. If he organized an event, a reading-as he did, for instance, at the 1986 PEN Conference, he stood back, had others present their work. He wasn't the least bit modest, he was anxious, he was courteous. He was always worried in the very act of hilarious opposition. There was sadness in our lightest conversations, across that literature of his. We laugh, but the poem in the prose is dark."

"Donald Barthelme has accomplished the work that the New Journalists are not competent to do. In a single story he is able to include more of the taste of the times than there is in the collected works of Wolfe, Breslin, Talese & Co. The difference lies in Barthelme’s ability to compress, almost to transistorize the world, and then make his miniatures real again by virtue of his talent for language."

"Barthelme is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He shields his blue eyes behind rimless glasses. He has red hair and a beard and dresses conservatively. He lives quietly in a floor-through walk-up on West 11th Street with his third wife, a Danish girl named Birgit, and his 4-year-old daughter, for whom he has made a most interesting pull-toy out of found objects. He is handy with carpenter’s tools. His manuscripts arrive at The New Yorker very neatly typed. He works in the morning and is often seen walking around the Village of an afternoon. His social life has been described as “incredibly commonplace”. ...He is known to grow quite restless confronted by the quiet of a country weekend. He is likely to become “aggressively silent” at large gatherings of literary people, but he is also a talkative and loyal intimate."

"There are people on my block who are writers I'm very fond of, and I'm very close to, friends like Barthelme and Sales and people like that."

"The Balloon" is a Donald Barthelme story. … In a 1996 Salon interview, David [Foster Wallace] told Laura Miller it was "the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer."

"In The New York Times Book Review, John Romano recalled “the excitement caused among readers” at the appearance of Don’s first stories in the 1960s. “There just weren’t then, as there aren’t now, very many stories published that you wanted to call your friends up and read aloud from; and Barthelme gave us more than a few.”"

"Barthelme isn’t easy, and he frequently fails, but he’s written some of the best stories of the last twenty years."

"“How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Donald replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.” Asked another, likewise disingenuosly, “How can we become better writers than we are?” “For starters," DB advised, “read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.” “But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester....” “That, too,” Donald affirmed, and turned on that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-Eleventh-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”"

"One of the U.S.'s most stylish and original satirists. He translates the chipped teacups, navel lint, prattle and random states of life into even rows of words that twitter, bong, flash, and glow..."

"As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them."

"Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons."

"I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, “I wish I knew as little about it as he does.”"

"I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on..."

"BILL: … We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages."

"HENRY: Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price."