Jess Walter Quotes & Sayings

He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it. — Jess Walter

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story! — Jess Walter

I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately. — Jess Walter

I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something. — Jess Walter

We want what we want - we love who we love. — Jess Walter

Claire happy to no longer expect ... but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. — Jess Walter

She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her — Jess Walter

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination. — Jess Walter

A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge, and then everything sort of ... fell in, him, his wife, his kid, and this fragile life they'd built at the edge of this hole. And that's why he was here, because he'd begun wondering if maybe his father hadn't fallen in the same hole - — Jess Walter

We want what we want — Jess Walter

Twenty meters away, Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. Or rather, he would think later, a dream's opposite: a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep. — Jess Walter

My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script. — Jess Walter

and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing - — Jess Walter

Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming? — Jess Walter

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn't the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons- but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it. That summer, the one you'll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images ... flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that become our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion? — Jess Walter

( ... ) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves) — Jess Walter

I guess I forgot we were going out tonight."
"We always go out on Fridays."
"It's Thursday, Alvis."
"You are so tied to routine. — Jess Walter

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love. — Jess Walter

You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person? — Jess Walter

Alarmingly, though, on top of the bookcase there is also a family portrait of Bea with two just-as-striking blond-and-blue-eyed sisters and a pair of handsome proud Nordic parents, whose stares make me aware of the vast age difference between Bea and me, and I am profoundly ashamed to be here buying drugs in this girl's apartment. What I'd really like to do, I think, is lie down on this couch and take a nap. — Jess Walter

What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? — Jess Walter

The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize. — Jess Walter

At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret? — Jess Walter

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once. — Jess Walter

I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case. — Jess Walter

It's once I discover the people inside that the story really gets going, and then the formal invention becomes less important. It's just the way in; it's the door; and then what's behind it is always some kind of people, which I think probably makes me more in the tradition of realistic fiction because that's usually what I'm interested in, the people. — Jess Walter

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names. — Jess Walter

There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors. — Jess Walter

Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. — Jess Walter

I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction. — Jess Walter

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. — Jess Walter

He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement. — Jess Walter

He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment. — Jess Walter

Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns ... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer Bit worked at the orchard. — Jess Walter

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. — Jess Walter

God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is. — Jess Walter

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events. — Jess Walter

Always speak first to the toughest person in the room. — Jess Walter

It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used. — Jess Walter

I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we're not really a culture geared to anything as humble as 'learning.' But I was disappointed in how quickly everyone wanted to get back to normal. It was as if we watched terrorism on TV for a while, then got bored and turned back to 'American Idol.' — Jess Walter

Divination of true nature. Of motivation. Of desirous hearts. I saw the whole world in a flash and I recognized it at once: We want what we want. — Jess Walter

Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life
not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment. — Jess Walter

Imagine never leaving North Idaho again. He's got his coffee and he's got his ritual, his work around the cabin, and with the new satellite dish Lydia buys him for his birthday, he's got nine hundred channels and he's got Netflix, — Jess Walter

Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world. — Jess Walter

The eye sees everything upside down," the artist explained, "and then the brain automatically reverses it. I'm just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it." Alvis — Jess Walter

Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,' ... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. — Jess Walter

Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers. — Jess Walter

But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale? He did know what she meant! It was just how he felt - like someone sitting in the cinema waiting for the film to start. — Jess Walter

Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be. — Jess Walter

Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. — Jess Walter

I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life. — Jess Walter

Among the world's evils - fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation - smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school. — Jess Walter

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write. — Jess Walter

Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. — Jess Walter

And it's a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death. — Jess Walter

I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself. — Jess Walter

And we want car wrecks. We say we don't. But we love them. To look is to love. A thousand people drive past the statue of David. Two hundred look. A thousand people drive past a car wreck. A thousand look. — Jess Walter

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love. — Jess Walter

Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing. — Jess Walter

No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac
if we've any luck at all. — Jess Walter

A book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It's the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them
and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they're too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. — Jess Walter

Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows. — Jess Walter

Then we'll make a deal, you and me. We'll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we'll smoke, if we want to swear, we'll swear. How does that sound? — Jess Walter

If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah. — Jess Walter

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25. — Jess Walter

fierce tonight. Insistent. — Jess Walter

(Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). — Jess Walter

He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision. — Jess Walter

And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of now - all those lovely wrecked lives. — Jess Walter

...life was a glorious catastrophe. — Jess Walter

I love humor in writing, so I've written to the thing that's funny, there's the joke, but then I just kept going. I started thinking about all the bikes I've had stolen, and that got me thinking about crime, and that got me thinking about the city I'm in. — Jess Walter

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for awhile, we're less alone. — Jess Walter

There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring? In — Jess Walter

He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox. — Jess Walter

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. — Jess Walter

I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn't represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I'm sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is. — Jess Walter

And he waited - as he always had - for life to come and find him. — Jess Walter

She laughed. 'That's what I love about you good-lookin' blokes. What, me? Have sex? — Jess Walter

With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way. — Jess Walter

The more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe — Jess Walter

There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there. — Jess Walter

There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy. — Jess Walter

You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it. — Jess Walter

My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth. — Jess Walter

Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?"
"Redemption," Shane says. — Jess Walter

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written. — Jess Walter

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't
and perhaps loses track of just where she is. — Jess Walter

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief. — Jess Walter

If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out. — Jess Walter

Be patient. Be bold. Be humble. Be confident. Don't give in to the speed and surface banality of the culture. Don't give in to jealousy, commerce, or fear. Do charity work, or coach kids, or be a Big Brother or Sister, or something. Whatever it takes to get out of your own head and avoid authorial narcissism. And whatever you do, don't ever take advice from authors. — Jess Walter

Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle. — Jess Walter

Guterak looked over. "Hey, you got your hair cut." "Yeah." Remy put the cap back on. "What made you do that?" "I shot myself in the head last night." "Well." Paul drove quietly for a moment, staring straight ahead. "It looks good. — Jess Walter

Maybe all love is hopeless. — Jess Walter

It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn't see each other's faces. — Jess Walter

Don't ever say that after sex, do you understand? If you feel the urge to say it, go see the girl first thing in the morning, with her night breath and no makeup ... watch her on the toilet ... listen to her with her friends ... go meet her hairy mother and her shrill friends ... and if you still feel the need to say such a stupid thing, then God help you. — Jess Walter

Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all. — Jess Walter

All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point? — Jess Walter

After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he'd somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he'd created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude. He glanced over at Orenzio, who was carrying someone's bags, and the whole world suddenly seemed so unlikely, our time in it so brief and dreamlike. He'd never felt such a detached, existential sensation, such terrifying freedom - it was as if he were hovering above the village, above his own body - and it thrilled him in a way that he could never have explained. — Jess Walter

Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? — Jess Walter

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories. — Jess Walter