George V. Higgins Quotes

#1. Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)

George V. Higgins

#2. Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

George V. Higgins

#3. The seductiveness of baseball is that almost everyone with an abiding interest in it knows exactly how it should be played. And secretly believes that he could do it, if only God had seen fit to make him just a little bit less clumsy.

George V. Higgins

#4. This life's hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.

George V. Higgins

#5. A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.

George V. Higgins

#6. Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

George V. Higgins

#7. You cannot write well without data.

George V. Higgins

#8. The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

George V. Higgins

#9. Life is hard but being stupid makes it harder.

George V. Higgins

#10. The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

George V. Higgins

#11. The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

George V. Higgins

#12. If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.

George V. Higgins

#13. Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

George V. Higgins

#14. Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.

George V. Higgins

#15. Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings.

George V. Higgins

#16. What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round,

George V. Higgins

#17. Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

George V. Higgins

#18. It was darker than a carload of assholes.

George V. Higgins