T.C. Boyle Quotes & Sayings

I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started. — T.C. Boyle

Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket? — T.C. Boyle

It was then that my gaze happened to fall on the bookcase, on the gap there, where the old paperback of "Nine Stories" had fallen flat. "Where's the thing?" I said.
"What thing?"
"The mesh. My mesh."
She shrugged. "I tossed it."
"Tossed it? Where? What do you mean?"
In the next moment I was in the kitchen, flipping open the lid of the trash can, only to find it empty. "You mean outside?" I shouted. "In the dumpster?"
When I came thundering back into the room, she still hadn't moved. "Jesus, what were you thinking? That was mine. I wanted that. I wanted to keep it."
Her lips barely moved. "It was dirty. — T.C. Boyle

The hardest thing in a novel is time. You've got [a line like] "two weeks later, he woke up with a headache," and you've got to add up that entire two weeks and what the date is and whether it works. That kind of stuff drives me crazy and if I don't have it exactly right, I can't move forward because I don't feel confident. — T.C. Boyle

The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
'It's been fun,' she said.
'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves. — T.C. Boyle

All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again. — T.C. Boyle

I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that's what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn't just live together
they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they'd collected along the way. — T.C. Boyle

They [my stories] evolve. If they're tightly constructed, it's because they're revised constantly as I move forward each day. That's where the structure inheres. It's all organic. — T.C. Boyle

One of the problems I have with many writers is their stories are all somewhat similar. They might be very good, but they're always on the same turf. I don't have those limitations. — T.C. Boyle

They wore each other like a pair of socks.
From Love of my Life — T.C. Boyle

She didn't recognize him and he didn't recognize her, because people and places change and what once was will never be again. — T.C. Boyle

I SHALL WIN!" She exclaimed. "You'll see! When the smoke of battle clears away I shall be a rainbow again
and, undying name
an altar of fire that you have tried to dash to hell. I shall weave a rose wreath and hang it round your neck. You will call it a yoke of bondage and curse it
no matter. You are afraid of the light I give you. You crouch in the darkness. Come, take my hand, I will lead you." And her valediction, intimating in its restraint whole words of love and grief and passionate regret, was, simply, Miriam. — T.C. Boyle

We've all had the experience of you pick up a book, you can't get into it, you can't concentrate.Then one day you pick up the same book and you don't hear the phone ring. You're totally absorbed. Same thing I have to do every day. When you get into that special place of unconsciousness - you get it listening to great music or seeing a great movie - it just takes you out of yourself, out of this whole world. There's no feeling quite like it. — T.C. Boyle

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story? — T.C. Boyle

To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend these characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us open up at least a little to those we might not like - in their presence, we might experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is crucial to living in a diverse world. — T.C. Boyle

Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good? — T.C. Boyle

I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record
Le Sacre du Printemps
caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame. — T.C. Boyle

Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace. — T.C. Boyle

I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story. — T.C. Boyle

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works. — T.C. Boyle

It's not going in that end! — T.C. Boyle

Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance. — T.C. Boyle

To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man. — T.C. Boyle

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life.
(Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009) — T.C. Boyle

We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information? — T.C. Boyle

Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature. — T.C. Boyle

He'd been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn't feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, — T.C. Boyle

The golf course. He never thought he'd sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land. — T.C. Boyle

Who was she in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in small letters: i am shit, i am anonymous, step on me. please. She wasn't voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn't in the band or Spanish Club and when her ten year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share. — T.C. Boyle

I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like. — T.C. Boyle

He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich. — T.C. Boyle

These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense. — T.C. Boyle

He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. — T.C. Boyle

He'd been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they'd be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege. — T.C. Boyle

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self? — T.C. Boyle

Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive. — T.C. Boyle

So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more. — T.C. Boyle

I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions. — T.C. Boyle

Nothing moves around, it just goes straight from the start to the end. The final draft on the final day, that's it, same for the novels. What I turn in is what you see. There are some exceptions, but almost always I can see exactly what it's going to be. — T.C. Boyle

We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it. — T.C. Boyle

I have many enemies and they all think I'm being highfalutin calling it performance, but the word "reading" has a connotation of something academic with the lights on and you're going to get a lecture. I'm looking to blow my audiences away by giving a fine, dramatic performance and reminding them of why they love stories. — T.C. Boyle

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003] — T.C. Boyle

I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way. — T.C. Boyle

This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing. — T.C. Boyle

I was not okay for one thing.For another, I'd passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit and beyond. — T.C. Boyle

If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. — T.C. Boyle

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness. — T.C. Boyle

I think if you read all my books you know where I stand, pretty much. You could probably give the reader a questionnaire and they could figure out what I'm about. But I don't think my job is to tell you that. — T.C. Boyle

Three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car. — T.C. Boyle

The reason we love nature is because it's fascinating and we love all the creatures, but if you watch any nature film, there's always a lesson: "the creatures are all dying and life sucks." The same is true of literature. — T.C. Boyle

First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something. — T.C. Boyle

Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story. — T.C. Boyle

Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language. — T.C. Boyle

... I thought I'd never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans. — T.C. Boyle

You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on. — T.C. Boyle

I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories. — T.C. Boyle

I have an idea and a first line
and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I'm going to say, or where it's going. I have some idea of how long it's going to be
but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That's the intrigue of doing it
it's a process of discovery. You get to discover what you're going to say and what it's going to mean. — T.C. Boyle

would be hell to pay when he got home. But the devil was in the back seat, keeping time to the music, and hell was a long way up the road. — T.C. Boyle

I've been in perfect health and perfectly happy all my life. I don't take any pills; I just get up, clean up after my wife, and start typing every day. — T.C. Boyle

I go around with my books so much and I love to perform on stage, to remind everybody that the lights are off, the phones are off, and for this hour, it's going to be like your mother reading to you. We're going to remember why we love stories. I think that gets lost in over-intellectualizing. — T.C. Boyle

From my point of view, why shouldn't I work in every possible mode, to see if it's viable? "Los Gigantes" would not have worked as a straightforward, naturalistic tale. Part of the fun of it is that it's so preposterous and yet at the same time, it could have happened. Think of eugenics. Hitler certainly would have been doing it if he could have. — T.C. Boyle

Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception. — T.C. Boyle

Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours. — T.C. Boyle

I always listen to music while I'm working and I always read aloud to my wife. I love to read aloud to an audience because there's a cadence and a beat. There's a music to the language that's very important to me. — T.C. Boyle

A mother's rage was too incandescent to blaze unshaded. — T.C. Boyle

I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too. — T.C. Boyle

Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue. — T.C. Boyle

I'm extremely worried. I'm worried about the survival of our species, worried about what we're doing, worried about being Americans, worried about depletion of resources. On the other hand, we are trying. We are trying to understand our impact on the environment. — T.C. Boyle

He wanted to talk about her-he was full of her-but he was telling a fine line here.He and Terry were men of the world and men of the world didn't moon over their woman. — T.C. Boyle

I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not? — T.C. Boyle

Especially students. I love to turn them on to a story. Some of them have to go see me as an assignment, like kids from the schools in New York will go to the Y. I want them to know why I love this and why they should too. — T.C. Boyle

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

Constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe — T.C. Boyle

I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out. — T.C. Boyle

Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain. — T.C. Boyle

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy? — T.C. Boyle

It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely. — T.C. Boyle

A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes - not elsewhere - I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world. — T.C. Boyle

I'm always trying to do something different and trying to keep myself amused. — T.C. Boyle

I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world. — T.C. Boyle

At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers. — T.C. Boyle

The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning. — T.C. Boyle

I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery. — T.C. Boyle

Work saved me. Literature saved me. It sounds corny but it's absolutely true. I was going in the wrong direction, but after the 9,000th night at the bar doing dope with a bunch of Dead Heads, I began to think there was something more. — T.C. Boyle

Survival Movement in Hostile Areas," most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS: B - Blends in with the surroundings L - Low in silhouette I - Irregular in shape S - Small in size S - Secluded — T.C. Boyle

The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome. — T.C. Boyle

I like to joke that you usually write more books before death than after death, so that's why I'm doing it. But really, I remain engaged with ideas. There are so many things happening that turn me on and I just want to examine them. — T.C. Boyle

There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was. — T.C. Boyle

I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do? — T.C. Boyle

Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions. — T.C. Boyle

I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way. — T.C. Boyle

A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new. — T.C. Boyle

If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do. — T.C. Boyle