Charles Baxter Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Charles Baxter.
Famous Quotes By Charles Baxter
Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around. — Charles Baxter
When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity. — Charles Baxter
The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out. — Charles Baxter
I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins. — Charles Baxter
In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising. — Charles Baxter
When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony. — Charles Baxter
He gave the impression of being clean and dry as though he had been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices. — Charles Baxter
And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves being gnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They are not mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. An acquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotional illness as "moth crazy. — Charles Baxter
The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. — Charles Baxter
There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her. — Charles Baxter
I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real. — Charles Baxter
Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware. — Charles Baxter
Say what you will about it, Hell is story friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over. — Charles Baxter
It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail. — Charles Baxter
[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation. — Charles Baxter
Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me. — Charles Baxter
Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters. — Charles Baxter
I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway. — Charles Baxter
After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism. — Charles Baxter
To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn't believe in giving advice, even when asked. — Charles Baxter
Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too. — Charles Baxter
It helps that in michigan everyone goes inside from november through april. but from may until october they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in. — Charles Baxter
You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. — Charles Baxter
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story. — Charles Baxter
Against the odds, they refuse to succeed. — Charles Baxter
If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has. — Charles Baxter
He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them. — Charles Baxter
As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life. — Charles Baxter
Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself. — Charles Baxter
At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world. — Charles Baxter
As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch. — Charles Baxter
Do you read, Mr. Quinn?" he asked. "Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. — Charles Baxter
In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely. — Charles Baxter
Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it. — Charles Baxter
My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads. — Charles Baxter
You can't reconstruct a story - you can't even know what the story is - if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history. — Charles Baxter
You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that. — Charles Baxter
Oh, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn't a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down. — Charles Baxter
At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing. — Charles Baxter
Ethics is a dream. — Charles Baxter
When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability. — Charles Baxter
There is no weather in malls. — Charles Baxter
Charm sometimes has a habit of taking its leave of you. (p.256) — Charles Baxter
Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us. — Charles Baxter
The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think. — Charles Baxter
One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it. — Charles Baxter
I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again. — Charles Baxter
Every day became an epic of endurance. — Charles Baxter
I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God's more complicated pranks. — Charles Baxter
She has a winning smile. She wins, she always wins. — Charles Baxter
Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history. — Charles Baxter
You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself. — Charles Baxter
You can not figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they're acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions. — Charles Baxter
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make. — Charles Baxter
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen. — Charles Baxter
Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in the front row of a theater, where the actors' spit lands on your face. — Charles Baxter
I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable. — Charles Baxter
Art is not a sack race. — Charles Baxter
On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. like me, its glimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replace by texture. The mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty. — Charles Baxter
I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic. — Charles Baxter
Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. — Charles Baxter
As Nietzsche says about Christians, you can tell from their faces that they don't enjoy doing what they do. Fiction writers cluster in the unlit corners of the room, silently observing everybody, including the poets, who are usually having a fine time in the center spotlight, making a spectacle of themselves as they eat the popcorn and drink the beer and gossip about other poets. — Charles Baxter
The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness. — Charles Baxter
It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective. — Charles Baxter
Making love to him was like going through a car wash, except you came out dirtier and more alive at the other end. — Charles Baxter
Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes. — Charles Baxter
When you're in love you don't have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don't have to move an inch. — Charles Baxter
You fall in love with someone not because he's nice to you or can read your mind but because, when he kisses you, your knees weaken, or because you can't stop looking at his skin or at the way his legs, inside his jeans, shape the fabric. — Charles Baxter
What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you
if you happen to be me
with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. — Charles Baxter
It didn't help that Oscar showed up in my dreams constantly ... I kept telling him to get actual, that he'd died, and he'd say, No no, honey, you got it all wrong. Oh, man, look at my hand. And I'd look at his hand that he held out, and I'd grab it, reaching out in dreamtime, doubting him, and it was there all right, but the touch of it, the tight tough skin exactly like Oscar's, would startle me with terror and love, and I'd wake up by myself in my apartment in the dark like a flashlight you've just switched on, with the traffic moving on the street outside the window and the headlights lighting the ceiling, and this big broken hole in me that Oscar had left behind, by dying. — Charles Baxter
You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have. — Charles Baxter
If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him. — Charles Baxter
Literature is not an instruction manual. — Charles Baxter
His was the kind of beauty for which you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow and all the varieties of rage. Eventually, you would have to go to church to get rid of him. — Charles Baxter
In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that. — Charles Baxter
Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative. — Charles Baxter
and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue. — Charles Baxter
An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that somebody considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source from the power of an unthinkable thought. — Charles Baxter
Creating a scene is thus the staging of a desire. — Charles Baxter
Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved. — Charles Baxter
You'll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won't have a chance against me until you're very old, if then. — Charles Baxter
Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".) — Charles Baxter
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel. — Charles Baxter
So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another, — Charles Baxter
Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream. — Charles Baxter
What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight. — Charles Baxter
Game of deducing a person's character from that person's appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority. — Charles Baxter
The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything. — Charles Baxter
Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11. — Charles Baxter
Of course they were children, he knew that, and that wasn't it. They gave off a terrible glow. They had the blank glow of angels. They lived smack in the middle of reality and never gave it a minute's thought. They'd never felt like actors. They'd never been sick with irony. The long tunnel of their thoughts had never swallowed them. They'd never had restless sleepless nights, the urgent wordless unexplainable wrestling matches with the shadowy bands of soul-thieves. God damn it, Sault thought. Everybody gets to be happy except me. Saul heard Anne's cries. The sun was sweating all over his forehead. He felt faint, and Jewish, as usual. He turned on the radio. It happened to be tuned to a religious station and some choir was singing When Jesus Wept. — Charles Baxter
The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation. — Charles Baxter