Bob Shacochis Quotes & Sayings

I want you so much, he said with such heart-tugging sincerity that to be fair, a translation from Turkish to English would have to flip a coin between "want" and "love. — Bob Shacochis

I'm asked all the time, 'Doesn't it feel great to finish the novel?' And the answer to that is, 'No.' It's sort of a loss to stop a 10-year project, which is an imaginary project in the sense that it's a work of my imagination. — Bob Shacochis

When you meet powerful men or just read about them in the newspapers, you see that they don't have a sense of boundaries. — Bob Shacochis

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.' — Bob Shacochis

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them. — Bob Shacochis

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing. — Bob Shacochis

Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay — Bob Shacochis

I should like to elbow aside the established pieties and raise my martini glass in salute to the mortal arts of pleasure. — Bob Shacochis

His arm came tentatively across her side to hug her breasts and she sighed so long and deeply and with such intense relief that when the sigh in fact ended she was still tucked under the lovely arching bridge of his arm and it was morning. — Bob Shacochis

Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place. — Bob Shacochis

It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others. — Bob Shacochis

--perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low sometimes lost their humanity-- — Bob Shacochis

It almost felt like too much, just by the sad weight of its being so little. — Bob Shacochis

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy. — Bob Shacochis

And how could she ever open her mouth to tell him, in the guise of reminiscing, I haven't been on a ferry in twelve years. Once upon a time I was a girl and my name was Dottie and I was seventeen and in love and I was real. I had a life that I loved and it was beautiful and the boy was beautiful and here I am again but once was enough, once is all you get to ask for, once is about all I can survive. — Bob Shacochis

I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world. — Bob Shacochis

The biggest challenge in the research process is to let go, to stop, to say enough, and then to reduce all of that beloved labor down to a few succinct paragraphs that shape the background to your narrative. I love research - that's all the fun, especially in the field. To write, however, is to suffer, and my pieces usually come in thousands of words over the assigned length. That's a serious flaw in my writing process - shaping and disciplining the footlockers of material one has so happily gathered. — Bob Shacochis

With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. — Bob Shacochis

Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he'd say - he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul. At the intersection ahead they could see — Bob Shacochis

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis