William Kennedy Quotes & Sayings

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet. — William Kennedy

Katie bar the door. — William Kennedy

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story. — William Kennedy

It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself. — William Kennedy

And what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn't drink? — William Kennedy

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown. — William Kennedy

He would not chance arrest by crawling into a corner of one of the old houses on Lower Broadway where the cops swept through periodically with their mindless net. What difference did it make whether four or six or eight lost men slept under a roof and out of the wind in a house with broken stairs and holes in the floors you could fall through to death, a house that for five or maybe ten years had been inhabited only by pigeons? What difference? — William Kennedy

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review. — William Kennedy

Love, is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shit of my soul. Stupid love, silly love. — William Kennedy

One never knows the potential within the human breast. — William Kennedy

Anger makes people stupid. — William Kennedy

The only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. they loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he's just a bum, but who ain't? — William Kennedy

But after awhile you stand up, wipe the frost out of your ear, go someplace to get warm, bum a nickel for coffee, and then start walkin' toward somewheres else that ain't near no bridge. — William Kennedy

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper. — William Kennedy

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory. — William Kennedy

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot. — William Kennedy

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move — William Kennedy

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it. — William Kennedy

But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste. — William Kennedy

In the years after the death of Petrus, Hillegond had refused all offers of marriage, certain that her knowledge of men, despite her uncountable intimate encounters with them, was seriously bescrewed. Further, she grew certain from a recurring nightmare that should she ever consider a man as a second spouse, he would strangle her in her bed with a ligature. — William Kennedy

I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history. — William Kennedy

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego. — William Kennedy