Adam Ross Quotes

#1. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

Adam Ross

#2. There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

Adam Ross

#3. A man who loves his mother too much is someone who can never love his wife enough.

Adam Ross

#4. He closed his eyes, shook his head. If he could get her alone somewhere, somewhere completely private, he'd kill her. He would break a rock over her head and split her skull open so that he could see, just for a second, what the fuck was in her mind.

Adam Ross

#5. Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

Adam Ross

#6. In a crazy way, writing is a lot like any kind of very complex game - like chess, where you have the knowledge as you're composing all of the ramifications of each move, of each choice you make.

Adam Ross

#7. Marriage is a kind of prison for anyone who's miserable in it - men and women alike - and anyone who's suffered through difficult periods in marriage dreams of escape from it.

Adam Ross

#8. We tell stories of other people's marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. Be can we tell the story of our own. If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.

Adam Ross

#9. The thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune's as random as the thought.

Adam Ross

#10. 'Mr. Peanut' is not about a man who dreams of killing his wife; that's jacket copy, to me. 'Mr. Peanut' is about the dynamism of marriage and the distances - some tragic, some redemptive - that marriages travel over time, and those travels ain't always pretty.

Adam Ross

#11. I play golf, but sometimes it's so un-relaxing, I have to play tennis to wind down. Now that I think about it, this process is sort of like when I go out for sushi and have to get a slice of pizza afterward.

Adam Ross

#12. Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.

Adam Ross

#13. Personally, I read fiction, in part, because I get to spend time with people who aren't my people.

Adam Ross

#14. By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

Adam Ross

#15. People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life. But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state.

Adam Ross

#16. I'm interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?

Adam Ross

#17. I can't imagine turning into one of those codgers who no longer reads fiction. I'm regularly stirred by it and suffer no anxiety of influence. Influence me! That was my credo then, as I was developing and learning, and remains so now, as I'm developing and learning.

Adam Ross

#18. Perhaps it's simply the dual nature of marriage, the proximity of violence and love.

Adam Ross

#19. It is possible, he thought, to be completely happy in marriage
though you must be willing to hold on when your ship was lost at sea and there was no guarantee of rescue.

Adam Ross

#20. I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Adam Ross

#21. You know, as I've grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don't think that now. I think sins are what you ignore.

Adam Ross

#22. Of all the thoughts we think, it's only those that actually manifest themselves that seem significant. But the thoughts just before the event are like the fortune in the cookie. The fortune's as random as the thought. - Nathan Harold

Adam Ross

#23. Ladies and gentlemen, if you ask someone to marry you and the person pukes, that's a sign.

Adam Ross

#24. The heart," he said, "is half criminal. The trick is to be vigilant. To keep your eyes open, so if you get a look at this side of yourself you can make a positive ID.

Adam Ross

#25. Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: 'Stop vamping.' It has remained a caution.

Adam Ross