Ron Carlson Quotes & Sayings

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that. — Ron Carlson

No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do. It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen. — Ron Carlson

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is. — Ron Carlson

My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away. — Ron Carlson

I always write from my own experiences, whether I've had them or not. — Ron Carlson

It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science. — Ron Carlson

Get down, get naked, get savage. — Ron Carlson

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. — Ron Carlson

My parents were farmers' kids from South Dakota. My dad was an engineer. I wanted to be responsible and major in something pragmatic. — Ron Carlson

I was writing a third novel when my kids arrived. And I looked at that book about whether these two people would get together, and I thought, 'I don't care! I've got kids!' — Ron Carlson

I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge. — Ron Carlson

I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story. — Ron Carlson

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It's simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understand that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you're doing, where you're going? Yes. It's impossible. Who can do it? The writer. — Ron Carlson

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing - inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher. — Ron Carlson

If we're really writing, we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. — Ron Carlson

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room. — Ron Carlson

The men and women, the weapons, the deerhunt all make a huge and fragile danger in John Bolger's novel The Hunters. There is care and harm in this book and all written with felicitous and steady grace. — Ron Carlson

The writer is the person who stays in the room. — Ron Carlson

I'm a Midwesterner. — Ron Carlson

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction. — Ron Carlson

I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi ... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota. — Ron Carlson

We live in a society that doesn't offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren't clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It's going to be a mess before you're finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we'll call it the draft of a story. — Ron Carlson

Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story. — Ron Carlson

I tell students, when in doubt, to title their story after the smallest concrete object in their story. I warn them off plays on words, ('The Rent Also Rises'
no; 'Life in My Cat House'
no) and no grand reaches, either. 'Reverence,' 'Respect,' 'Regret,' 'Greed,' 'Adventure,' 'Retribution.' And never use the worst title of all time, 'The Gift,' a story I read six times a year. — Ron Carlson

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time! — Ron Carlson

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us. — Ron Carlson

I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story. — Ron Carlson

I have these habits. I'm not a crazy artist. Or am I? — Ron Carlson

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me. — Ron Carlson

In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact! — Ron Carlson

I don't live in books, but, boy, have books amplified my life. — Ron Carlson

Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon. — Ron Carlson

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters. — Ron Carlson