Jincy G Quotes & Sayings

Actually, the Sniper's sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carla's poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvy's critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, focused on that "youse" in the Sniper's counterfeit email. "Youse" was like a spectral elbow to Amy's ribs. Dangerous, malevolent people should not be amusing. In order to be humorous, you had to have perspective, to be able to stand outside yourself and your own needs and grudges and fears and see yourself for the puny ludicrous creature you really are. How could somebody do that and still imagine himself entitled to harry, to wound, to kill? — Jincy Willett

It was morning, and nothing frightened Amy in the morning, because her will to live never kicked in until after lunch. — Jincy Willett

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking. (Jincy Willett) — Jincy Willett

When it comes to books, I am a sensuous woman. — Jincy Willett

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you. — Jincy Willett

So here is where I am so far, and this is all I know: the world is a big sardine can, and some of us are too agreeable for words. Most of us, really. — Jincy Willett

(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing. — Jincy Willett

I love you," Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, "but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you"; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, "You son of a bitch. — Jincy Willett

I'm not exactly the zeitgeist queen. — Jincy Willett

Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker. — Pamela Paul

...(W)here there's drama, there's crap. — Jincy Willett

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad. — Jincy Willett

Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence. — Jincy Willett

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do. — Jincy Willett

There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with a surprise inside. — Jincy Willett

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot. — Jincy Willett

Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read. — Jincy Willett

With this book I hope what I always hope - that readers will nod their heads (not constantly, you know, but at the odd juncture) and think, "Yes, that's exactly right." This is why we write, and this is why we read. It's an act of communication, and if what you're communicating is true - if you haven't screwed it up (and there are so many ways to do that) - the response of your ideal reader isn't "Wow! What a fabulous sentence!" or "Wow! I did not know that!" It's "Yes. Exactly. I felt that too once, and I forgot it until now, and I thought I was the only one. — Jincy Willett

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was. — Jincy Willett

She pretended to find dust ruffles feminine and cozy, but really they were just flimsy barriers beyond which lurked the malign viscosity under her bed. — Jincy Willett

What was the value, really, of an alibi between lovers, friends, or family members? Idea for greeting card: 'Will You Be My Alibi? — Jincy Willett

I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc's and Mac's. Nobody on God's earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute. — Jincy Willett

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining. — Jincy Willett

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes. — Jincy Willett

The future, vague and sad, did not frighten me half as much as knowing that it was not carved in stone. — Jincy Willett

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop. — Jincy Willett

We are so lonely here, with only our loved ones for company. We kill, maim, insult our loved ones, or dream of doing so, to keep from going mad. And then disaster strikes. God, how we love disaster. — Jincy Willett

All plots are cliche. — Jincy Willett

(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines ... you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich. — Jincy Willett

Arithmetic is the death of story. — Jincy Willett