Jerome Charyn Quotes

#1. Lincoln prevailed: wearing his green shawl in the White House and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth.

Jerome Charyn

#2. Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art.

Jerome Charyn

#3. Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?

Jerome Charyn

#4. Many of the writers I admire - Melville, Dickinson, Kafka - were virtually invisible during their lifetimes. Art, I think, often has to dance around in the void.

Jerome Charyn

#5. Only a crazy man would write a novel in Lincoln's voice.

Jerome Charyn

#6. We're the country of movie stars because the stars, like ourselves, represent a kind of extended infantilism, beauties waiting for the big chance.

Jerome Charyn

#7. Emily Dickinson has haunted my life - her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I've had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.

Jerome Charyn

#8. I dreamed my way into Lincoln and the details that moved me - his lack of education or 'civilized' manners and his deep connection to all humankind.

Jerome Charyn

#9. stillborn love notes provide small satisfaction

Jerome Charyn

#10. Some readers may be disturbed that I wrote 'The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson' in Emily's own voice. I wasn't trying to steal her thunder or her music. I simply wanted to imagine my way into the head and heart of Emily Dickinson.

Jerome Charyn

#11. I can say without melodrama or malice that Hollywood ruined my life.

Jerome Charyn

#12. It was difficult to find my way into 'I Am Abraham,' to feel confident enough to inhabit Lincoln's persona. I began with a prologue in a neutral voice, wrote of Lincoln at the White House with a sly young reporter quizzing him about his humble origins.

Jerome Charyn

#13. 'Suttree' is a fat one, a book with rude, startling power and a flood of talk. Much of it takes place on the Tennessee River, and Cormac McCarthy, who has written 'The Orchard Keeper' and other novels, gives us a sense of river life that reads like a doomed 'Huckleberry Finn.'

Jerome Charyn

#14. What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

Jerome Charyn

#15. I believe in monstrosities, and 'I Am Abraham' is a monstrosity of sorts, raveling out moment by moment with its contrapuntal songs, as if a band of musicians were at play, all of them with Lincoln's beard and disturbing grey eyes.

Jerome Charyn

#16. I had a terror - since September - I could tell to none - and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground -

Jerome Charyn