Tom Drury Quotes & Sayings

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome. — Tom Drury

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable. — Tom Drury

If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you. — Tom Drury

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well. — Tom Drury

It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes. Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life. — Tom Drury

I think, most of us, when we look back over our lives, see perhaps moments when everything was dangerous and precarious. We're making all these mistakes, and yet somehow we make it through. It's the making it through that that interests me. To go through the valley of trouble and come out the other side. That's what we all have to do. — Tom Drury

I like the writing life, but it's not something that always makes enough money. — Tom Drury

Very few things are totally devoid of any possibility of humor. If you are aware of that possibility and alive to the scene becoming that way, then it just happens naturally. That's what I feel living is like, too. I find a lot of things that make me smile or make me laugh over the course of the day. — Tom Drury

I really like people. But I don't know how it will end. — Tom Drury

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs. — Tom Drury

A face is a kind of a mask anyway, when you think about it," he said.
Rudd took a drink and set the glass down. "You should never ask Pierre anything."
"You don't make your face," said Pierre. "It's given to you. You might think it represents your true self, but why would it? Half the time you make an expression and think, Oh, this is my whatever expression, and nobody even knows what you're thinking. — Tom Drury

Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health. — Tom Drury

My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums ... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13. — Tom Drury

PIerre tried to work up a stormy heart of romantic loss about breaking up with Rebecca. It gave him license to drink and brood with hard eyes, which he found interesting. — Tom Drury

Louise closed her eyes. She could not define what she was feeling but knew no other way to express it than to say that she loved him. So that's what she said. It occurred to her that you only get glimpses of love, your whole life, just bits and pieces. — Tom Drury

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel. — Tom Drury

My life in the town I grew up in was much quieter than 'The End of Vandalism.' Part of the reason I think I wrote it was because it was too damn quiet when I was young, and I wanted people to come out and talk. And they do. There's so much dialogue in 'The End of Vandalism.' — Tom Drury

I do get very involved in making a scene work without giving too much thought about how it affects the overall, which I think is hard to know in any case. — Tom Drury

After he got hammered one night at a high place about Lens Lake called the Grade, his parents found him standing in the kitchen.
"What if there was a language with only one word in it?" he asked.
"It would be easy to learn," said his mother.
"And with that word they would say everything every time they spoke," said Pierre.
"Yeah, that would be some language," said his father. "What are you on?"
"Just drinking," said Pierre. "Just good old American drinking. — Tom Drury

I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing. — Tom Drury

I don't think of my characters as bumbling. I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given. — Tom Drury

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way. — Tom Drury

Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together. — Tom Drury

I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers. — Tom Drury

I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.' — Tom Drury