Joe Meno Quotes & Sayings

Maybe it was better to just go on believing everything was OK, even when
really bad things were just about to happen. — Joe Meno

We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything. — Joe Meno

Whether you work with a small or corporate press, the important thing is to have realistic expectations in terms of sales, promotion, and the work you have to do as an author promoting your novel. — Joe Meno

Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind. — Joe Meno

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there. — Joe Meno

I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn't going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter? — Joe Meno

I'm kind of interested in learning to learn and grow and challenge myself. I think I've been very fortunate in that my books are pretty different from one novel to the next. There's a lot of things that are similar but in terms of tone and the scale and how they interact with history and just the different styles as well. — Joe Meno

I told you why. If I don't do it now, I never will. I'll just be some office drone ten years from
now, wishing I had done something interesting at least once in my life. — Joe Meno

What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths. — Joe Meno

Maybe. Because he's got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything. — Joe Meno

Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse. — Joe Meno

Without death, there is hardly any threat strong enough to truly appreciate human life. He thinks: I am as good as dead
too afraid to live, only waiting, never taking a risk
I am as good as dead already. — Joe Meno

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song. — Joe Meno

The more you like a girl, the less she likes you. It's like fucking scientific."
"What about you and Kim?"
"That's what I'm talking about, little dude. If I start being nice and acting cool and saying things
and being on time, she starts acting, you know, fucking uninterested. But if I act like a total dick, then
she calls me all the fucking time. It's fucking crazy, because I really like her and all, but when I say
nice shit to her, she gets all freaked out and says she needs some fucking space and all. So I just act
like I don't give a shit, you know? It's all part of God's plan," he said, nodding. — Joe Meno

Where do you go when you die? Ha ha. Go on, go on and tell her, Billy."
Billy smiles. "You become a little voice in someone's ear telling them that things will be alright. — Joe Meno

The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are. — Joe Meno

And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like ... anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap. — Joe Meno

I don't like the fact that no one has any imagination anymore. It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone. Nobody wants you to think about anything new or use your brain or make anything interesting because everything important has already been made. America is over; it's done being brilliant.Everything genius has already been built, like all the great works of art have already been produced. — Joe Meno

I really do. It's the first time I don't have to think at work, you know. It's really simple. You
just answer the phone and put in people's orders. It's pretty laid back. You don't like it?"
"No. I feel like it's killing my brain."
"Maybe that's why I like it. I don't mind not having to think. — Joe Meno

Please let there be a heaven for everything that is too pitiful to believe. — Joe Meno

I'm still trying to figure things out too. All I know is a couple of very unimportant things. — Joe Meno

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this. — Joe Meno

How's life?"
"That's the stupidest question I've ever heard. — Joe Meno

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is. — Joe Meno

The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict. — Joe Meno

When she cries, it is quiet, tearless, almost completely imperceptible: one more unheard prayer. — Joe Meno

We're adults," he says quickly. "I'm only here to work. I won't bother you or anything."
"Fine," she says. "Great."
"Great," he repeats.
"We're too good of work friends anyways."
"We are?"
"I mean, we're probably too much alike," she says.
"Yeah, it would be too weird. If things didn't work out."
"These things never work out," she says.
"Exactly," he says.
"Exactly."
"Right," he adds. "Exactly."
"And who needs all the weirdness? — Joe Meno

Sacrifice doesn't really exist on a national level anymore and that's a pretty new thing - most people aren't engaged nationally in some form of service and that changes the way you think about people in your country; you kind of think of them at a distance. And so there's that shift away from some sort of sacrifice - thinking of yourself as the most important thing in the world versus thinking of yourself as some sort of a whole. — Joe Meno

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once. — Joe Meno

In our town there is a secret spot where you can still see the stars at night, believe it or not. It is the only spot like that left, unclouded by the dwindling skyscrapers rising nearby. It is a good place to go to walk and talk in whispers. Following the little hill that rises from the park to a small clearing which overlooks the statue of the armless general on his bronze steed, most of us later remember this spot as the first place we knew we might be in love. — Joe Meno

The city is just too big and too full of people to be alone. — Joe Meno

In our town - our town of shadows, our town of mystery - it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything. — Joe Meno

I was a shy kid and I was afraid what i said sounded stupid, so I hardly ever saud anything. I was the third wheel. Fifth wheel? I was the fucking wheel you didn't really need, but I still hung around. I thought maybe my silence would one day impress somebody. As of yet, it hadn't done much for me. — Joe Meno

As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented. — Joe Meno

I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion. — Joe Meno

I've been thinking a
lot and it's not that anyone did anything wrong. We just didn't know what we wanted. We weren't the
people we were supposed to be yet, — Joe Meno

The last four days
where everything has finally made some sense. And why is she so ready to throw this away? Because.
Because eventually every relationship she's been in has turned to shit. Eventually she ends up
screwing everything up. So maybe it's better to leave now before people's feelings get hurt. — Joe Meno

Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant's lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor. — Joe Meno

People are just greedy animals, after all. — Joe Meno

The only thing all men have in common with one another is their inherent capacity to make mistakes. But there is wonder in the attempt, knowing we are all destined to fall short, but forgoing reason and fear time and time again so deliberately. — Joe Meno

The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave. — Joe Meno

And realizes how there are all these moments, moments like just this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what's so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last. — Joe Meno

What Mr. Albee most desires is for the Model UN, the entire group of them, all eleven, even the scoundrel Quinn, to be there waiting, when he gets home each dreary night, and there again when he awakes in the morning, all of them politely debating one another with their resplendent voices, their hearts - which have not yet been broken by anything more serious than an unrequited crush or an unfair grade - quietly aglow with everything. — Joe Meno

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling. — Joe Meno

Slow as your own dubious grace. — Joe Meno

An act of evil is the death of wonder — Joe Meno

Just because you have blue hair and fucked-up clothes doesn't mean you're better than everyone
else. Because you know what? You're just conforming to someone else's code. Even though you don't
wear khakis or sweaters or whatever, but to me all you guys look the same. You think you're so
individualistic, but you're not. You guys - you and Kim and all the rest - you're like anti-snob snobs.
But you're just as mean as the preppy kids. You're all just as fucking lame. — Joe Meno

Beneath all of her thoughts and worries, beneath the complication of conflicting identities and needs, maybe it's as simple as loving the way some other person looks when they're sleeping. — Joe Meno

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word into image, connecting these images to memories, dreams and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it ... The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests. — Joe Meno

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves. — Joe Meno

Jack: Well, I've never been to New York, but I hear it's for assholes.
Odile: It's not.
Jack: Well, that's what I heard. Cool people don't live there anymore, They all live here. In Chicago. — Joe Meno

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well. — Joe Meno

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak. — Joe Meno

Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her. — Joe Meno

Apples are kissing other apples. Gray cats are kissing other gray cats. Trees are kissing trees. You and I are not kissing. We work in an office together. We are both married to other people. It is okay because we only have ideas, you and I, about whether we should kiss or not. These ideas are both good and bad, probably.
At work, we do not say these words aloud but make elaborate diagrams for one another. You write these words: Kissing you would be like this, and draw a picture of two butterflies being struck by lightning. I stare at it and wonder if you may be right. I do my own drawing and write, Kissing you would be like this, and sketch a picture of a man made of ice kissing a woman who is actually a stove. We have made hundreds of these drawings. We do not actually do any work. — Joe Meno

But why? Why did you do the evil things you did?' Billy asks suddenly.
'Ah, because I could not imagine consequences,' the Professor says. 'To do harm, to live through evil, is to align oneself with chaos. Now it is the same chaos which is slowly destroying me. — Joe Meno

There's slowly been a kind of shift in how we think about childhood. It's like childhood almost extends to 20 or 22 even after the end of college. When I was growing up, there was this expectation that you were on your own now. — Joe Meno

For years, Thisbe will later think of that one moment in the field as the only time she was ever sure about anything in her life. — Joe Meno

C. On that cloudless Saturday morning, Madeline wakes up and sees Jonathan lying beside her, then decides that she's probably going to end up loving him forever. — Joe Meno

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out. — Joe Meno

-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy?
-No, definitely not, sir.
-Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you?
-Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir.
-Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think.
-I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir.
-One more month? Why?
-Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime.
-And why not?
-I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside.
-Why?
-Because everything happy right now is going to die.
-But Billy...
-I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty.
-But Billy, of course, anything might...
-I would not like to be reminded.
-OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy. — Joe Meno

The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be. — Joe Meno

It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy. — Joe Meno

I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience. — Joe Meno

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity ... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more. — Joe Meno

When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, by the time you were 16, you were kind of expected to be an adult. By the time we were 16 and able to drive, certainly by 17 or 18 and into college, you just had very little interaction with your parents. — Joe Meno

We did something very simple," Effie says.
"Yes, and what was that?"
Effie Mumford stares off the porch into the night sky. The first stars of the evening are quietly arriving, and Billy, following her gaze, listens as the small girl speaks.
"We allowed ourselves, for one brief moment, to believe in something we could not see. — Joe Meno

I don't think I'm special. I want you to know that," Odile says sharply. "I don't think I'm better than everybody else. — Joe Meno

Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy. — Joe Meno

Listen, I'm going to give you some advice, not because I
think you need it, but because I feel like I've earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is:
don't hold onto things. It's a problem the men in my family have. It's taken me a long time to figure
this out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It's what we do. But
sometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass. — Joe Meno

As the liquid paper's fumes quell his brain activity, Jack finds himself staring at
her again and what he thinks is this: Wow. — Joe Meno

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live. — Joe Meno

It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula. — Joe Meno

It's pretty hard not to like her," he says. "Even when
you know you shouldn't. — Joe Meno

It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn't ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween everyday, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren't alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe. — Joe Meno

You scan the cheering bleachers for the strange boy's face: handsome, reserved, with the eye patch, a little dramatic, a little scary. You finally find him sitting there in the middle of the sixth row. He is wearing a dark green army jacket and is staring back at you. He looks sad and beautiful, like a watercolor in a hospital room. — Joe Meno

[Sex] is really awkward. You know you have expectations and then it's this great moment of connection and it's a surprise. But that's what so exciting about it is that sense of surprise. — Joe Meno

Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink's Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus. — Joe Meno

Do not be confused by what the natural world knows: We are all, in our own way, completely and totally alone. If love is real, it is complete and total failing of the intellect. It is utter self-destruction. It is pandemonium. — Joe Meno

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen. — Joe Meno

After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night. — Joe Meno

What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago. — Joe Meno

An apple could make you laugh: You are so charming. On our lunch, we find our way along the crowded boulevard. You stop abruptly and pluck two green apples from someone selling them on the street. You look at them and decide they are in love, these two apples. You make them whisper to one another. You make them dance: The kinds of dances they do are dainty. spontaneous. At the end of the dancing, the apples get marries in a little ceremony. After the two apples kiss, you and I laugh. It'll be okay going for the two apples, they will get on fine, anyone can tell. Together, we walk back to the office and hate each other for how easily we can laugh about this. — Joe Meno

I was getting close to thirty and was trying on the idea of becoming more mature. I was reading more. I had gone out and bought a lot of shirts. — Joe Meno

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important. — Joe Meno

I did a bad thing tonight, one of the most terrible things ever: I waited for her to fall asleep, then stole the sheet from under her head. I am missing you or maybe just the idea of you. I have begun seriously thinking about other men. I am afraid I am not strong enough or tough enough for this. I am afraid all the time. I have not slept well in months. When are you coming back, you jerk? We are all trying to be brave without you and doing a real crummy job of it. I do not want to have to be brave anymore without you. — Joe Meno