Novelists From Boston

"... every man is practically three men. There is the man you know before he proposes: there is the man you have accepted: there is the man you have married."

"Disappointments—like fate and love—will not bear to be too much talked about."

"All is vanity,...discovering it—the greatest vanity."

"My dear, a man with a career can have no time to waste upon his wife or his friends—he has to devote himself wholly to his enemies!"

"It is our imagination, not our conscience, which makes us better than the beasts of the field."

"A man's way of loving is so different from a woman's," sighed Anna. "There ain't nothing," said Mrs. Grimmage, "there ain't nothing that makes them so sulky and turns them against you so soon as saying anything like that."

"Faults! I adore faults! I can never find too many in any creature."

"If women thought less of their own souls and more about men's tempers, marriage wouldn't he what it is."

"Men astonish themselves far more than they astonish their friends."

"Ideals, my dear Golightly, are the root of every evil. When a man forgets his ideals he may hope for happiness, but not till then."

"A statesman's words, like butcher's meat, should be well weighed."

"We must know the measure of a man's desires before we can sound the depth of his regrets."

"All forced virtue is degrading in its effect."

"In three bestselling novels over eight years, Amor Towles has established himself as one of our most beloved contemporary novelists, exhibiting a chameleon-esque ability to inhabit vastly different settings and s in a style uniquely his own, yet never the same from book to book."

"(quote at 6:53 of 58:49)"

"I think that, for the most part, I've have always tried to keep my focus on telling a story without worrying about what it might mean to others. ... Some people really write towards having a message. And, for me it's always been, when someone says, 'What is your book about?' — if I could say to them what my book was about in a few sentences, that book would be a failure — for sure."

"The 1930s . . . What a grueling decade that was. I was sixteen when the began, just old enough to have had all my dreams and expectations duped by the effortless glamour of the twenties. It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach a lesson. After the , you couldn't hear the bodies hitting the pavement, but there was a sort of communal gasp and then a stillness that fell over the city like snow. The bands laid down their instruments and the crowds made quietly for the door. ... Poverty and powerlessness. Hunger and hopelessness. At least until the omen of war began to lighten our step."

"Eve Ross . . . Eve was one of those surprising beauties from the . In New York it becomes so easy to assume that the city's most alluring women have flown in from Paris or . But they're just a minority. A much larger covey hails from the stalwart states that begin with the letter I—like Iowa and Indiana and Illinois. Bred with just the right amount of fresh air, roughhousing, and ignorance, these primitive blondes set out from the cornfields looking like starlight with limbs. Every morning in early spring one of them skips off her porch with a sandwich wrapped in cellophane ready to flag down the first headed to —this city where all things beautiful are welcomed and measured and, if not immediately adopted, then at least tried on for size."

"When I finish writing a novel, I find myself wanting to head in a new direction. That’s why after writing Rules of Civility—which describes a year in the life of a young woman about to climb New York’s socioeconomic ladder—I was eager to write A Gentleman in Moscow—which describes three decades in the life of a Russian aristocrat who’s just lost everything. The Lincoln Highway allowed me to veer again in that the novel focuses on three eighteen-year-old boys on a journey in 1950s America that lasts only ten days. The reason I make a shift like this is because it forces me to retool almost every element of my craft. By changing the , the era, and the cast of characters, I also must change the narrative’s perspective, tone, and poetics so that they will be true to these people in this situation at this moment in time. Similarly, by changing the duration of the tale—from a year to thirty years to ten days—the structure, pacing, and scope of thematic discovery all have to change."

"A lot of us come to writing because we love to read books and read very widely. And if you are a Black person or a person of color or a white woman or a woman of color or a Black woman, so many of the books that you’re told to read—“You love to read, read this book”—you’re not in them. Those books could be very wonderful and formative, but I think as a creator, you have to think about, where am I actually writing to and from, and what am I going to pull from? Am I going to pull from the tradition that is not necessarily my language, but I’ve been told is the language of fiction? Or do I pull from the things that are actually around me to make stories— make meaning for myself and for the people who I want to write to?"

"I read the same five people over and over again. But it’s Toni Morrison; Toni Cade Bambara is a huge influence..."

"One of the things that guided how I was thinking about the ending was this Alice Walker quote, where she’s talking about writing The Color Purple and about what a radical act it is to give certain characters a happier, peaceful ending. I don’t know that Libertie necessarily has a happy ending, but she has an ending in which she is in a place of strength that she wasn’t necessarily before. That was really important for me, as an artistic and political choice. As I was writing the first draft, I was also teaching the Toni Morrison novel Love. I was reading a lot of her interviews around the time that book came out, and she did this really wonderful interview with Charlie Rose. He asks her about her characters being happy and she says something like, “They know something about themselves that they didn’t know before. And so in that way, they have won.” And she said, “Winning isn’t like your character gets a fancy car at the end or a big job, or gets the girl or anything like that. Winning is, they didn’t know something about themselves before and now they understand something about themselves fundamentally at the end of the narrative. And in that way, they have ‘won.’” And then she says, sort of very playfully, as she does in her interviews, she says, “I only write about winners.” So I think about that a lot when I’m writing and thinking about what sort of choices the characters make and why you may follow a character through a story and what that might look like when you’re writing."

"The work of a fiction writer is to take narrow experiences and explore the emotional vastness that’s within them."

"Nonfiction and fiction are both about asking questions and hopefully inviting a reader into an ongoing conversation."

"I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always been more nuanced conversations, about the joy found in some aspects of parenting, how this perspective does and doesn’t inform creative life, and how one has a full community life as an artist even if one isn’t as a mother."

"I write for Black women. If others enjoy as well, I am really happy that they connect to the work. But if I were to write a piece that everyone except Black women connected to, I would feel, on some level, that I’d failed."

"We’re going on like year 250 of this argument that doesn’t seem to be true. A statistic that really struck me that I read a few years back was that the Obama administration is the only administration in like the last 40 years, I think, that didn’t have any felony convictions come out of anybody working in that administration. Unfortunately, that is a remarkable fact of American political life. So, even with a presidency, and Obama I’m not suggesting was like a wonderful, blameless president and did everything correct, but within the letter of the law, he sure did apparently. So, even in that instance of the Obamas so carefully curating their public persona and public approach for a white audience, for a white middle-class swing voter audience, and really catering to that audience in their policy, and general stance—even in that case of like the best “Good Negro” we could ever produce resulted in Trump. I just really want to push back on this idea that white backlash is somehow something that can be satiated or stopped in any sort of way, and that it’s more a function of the social construct of whiteness and what’s within that."

"I love history, particularly the stories that get left out of overarching narratives because they are deemed too niche, strange, uncomfortable, or hard to understand. There’s so much in the archives waiting to be discovered. I think a big misconception is that our current moment is somehow one that has never before been experienced. One of the pleasures of studying history is finding the ways the past mirrors the present, and is also completely different and points to radically different outcomes."

"The contemporary fiction I read is mostly by Black, queer, and Black and queer writers. There are some extraordinary people working right now and there are scenes in literary fiction being published that I know wouldn’t have been published five years ago. But they probably would have 45 years ago. Tommy Orange, Torrey Peters, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Maisy Card are all extraordinary. Art is cyclical – it’s less about getting better, and more about looking for those books and pieces that have always done what I described above – inviting people into a conversation, always going deeper. They’re out there. They just aren’t necessarily a part of “the canon” and definitely aren’t regularly taught to others. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond; Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven; Carlene Hatcher Polite’s The Flagellants are all books like this."

"One mantra of the last couple years that I’ve given myself is: we do not have time for shorthand anymore. We don’t have time to reduce things to its pithiest element. We do not have time for that because that actually sets us back so far and muddies the water so much and just messes up the actual conversation. We should be looking at works and having big, messy, and complicated discussions about them."

"("what radicalized you?") When we lived in public housing my mom started a community garden to grow food to save money and to occupy the kids that lived there and the public housing, authority came & pulled out all the plants and poured bleach into the ground to destroy it. Because gardens weren't allowed."

"The whole nature of how ppl respond to this coup would change if ppl, knew the full history of Reconstruction--and learned it as "white identity based mobs regularly overturned elections whenever a Black person or someone perceived as a Black ally was elected"

"The question of the silent majority, I think that the demographic that that phrase is invoking exists, but I don’t think they’ve ever been silent. I think they’ve probably been pretty loud in the chorus of what people think America can or should be. But a key part, at least in there, that demographics’ identity of the last 50 years ago, since the 70s, is this idea that they are somehow on the defensive, that they’re somehow oppressed, which is super interesting. I think if there’s anything that is different about white supremacy in this moment than it has been in the past in American culture is that it’s very much invested in the idea of whiteness as victimhood and less sort of whiteness under attack, which are two slightly different things. The older version of white supremacy is whiteness under attack, but always triumphant. And this version is very much whiteness as a marginalized identity, somehow, in this country."

"Read the books that are really messy. Read the books that everybody is telling you are problematic. And actually pick a part that word. When I was teaching, the last quarter of class I had to sort of be like, “we can’t use that word to talk about books because it means absolutely nothing.”"

"I said, “The term white backlash frames those actions as inevitable and natural, as if order is being restored after Black liberation goes ‘too far.’ And while I agree that white backlash inevitably follows Black freedoms, I do not think there’s anything natural or blameless about it. What if the conversation instead was framed as ‘There’s something in the construction of whiteness that demands violent supremacy, when even the glimmer of another way of being comes through, and why is that?’“ So, I thought a lot about how I was taught about white backlash in history class growing up. I don’t even think we were allowed to attach the word “white” to it. I think it was just sort of like backlash in general. It’s often framed as sort of, “Well, what do you expect people to do? Like, this is sort of like a bridge too far.” And even for myself, I think I’ve internalized that."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) ...Ottessa Moshfegh’s razor-sharp short stories “Homesick for Another World”"

"In order to write well, I need to have the ability to be honest with myself without it causing pain. When I’m really sad, honesty hurts, and I find myself not going to interesting places in my work. I guess you can be sad and strong at the same time. Writing requires strength, discipline, and a tolerance for loneliness. The longer I have a partner, the more loneliness I want, because I’ve lost it. But loneliness is also excruciating unless I’m writing. Yet you can only write so many hours in a day, and it takes a lot of effort to fill the void of not writing."

"What in effect looks like clear and directed writing took much chaos and anxiety. I felt like I was losing my mind toward the end."

"Thinking abstractly about depression is so easy, but the experience of it is more like being in touch with something very, very deep that is a necessary part of the human experience. It keeps us grounded in our mortality. Depression is an intolerance to life, but it can also be profound. Maybe the trouble is that we don’t respect it enough…"

"One challenge for me is in remembering what the process of writing the novel was like. For me, it’s a bit like childbirth (or so I hear) in that one forgets the pain as soon as it’s over…"

"to fashion silence into words"

"Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her."

"I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum."

"Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open."

"Wickham is not an upwardly mobile community. It's dingy and gray as only a mill town can be. The streets are the color of a shoe bottom, and the only way to tell the difference between the bars and the homes is to look for the neon signs in the windows. The roads and sidewalks are uneven, the tar cracked and pale. Many of the people, especially the workers as they trudge home from the mills in the dying light, have the look of those who've long ago gotten used to the fact that no one remembers them. It's a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on."

"Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well...Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew."

"Local self-government…is the life-blood of liberty."

"As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the street."

"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries."

"When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy."