Jess Walter Quotes & Sayings

#1. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#2. And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.

Jess Walter

#3. In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?

Jess Walter

#4. Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out.

Jess Walter

#5. We want what we want

Jess Walter

#6. Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't
and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

Jess Walter

#7. Stories are nations, empires.

Jess Walter

#8. I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves.

Jess Walter

#9. There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.

Jess Walter

#10. Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming?

Jess Walter

#11. Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.

Jess Walter

#12. First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone - )

Jess Walter

#13. Our lives have a way of eddying back on themselves, offering us the same view over and over, daring us to get it right just once.

Jess Walter

#14. All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

Jess Walter

#15. And I wonder if we don't live like water
seeking a level
a low bed
until one day we just go dry.
I wonder if a creek ever realizes
it has made its own grave.

Jess Walter

#16. If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.

Jess Walter

#17. The whole world is sick ... we've all got this pathetic need to be seen. We're a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention.

Jess Walter

#18. Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

Jess Walter

#19. He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

Jess Walter

#20. Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle.

Jess Walter

#21. fierce tonight. Insistent.

Jess Walter

#22. She laughed. 'That's what I love about you good-lookin' blokes. What, me? Have sex?

Jess Walter

#23. Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.

Jess Walter

#24. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?

Jess Walter

#25. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ...

Jess Walter

#26. Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

Jess Walter

#27. With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way.

Jess Walter

#28. Imagine never leaving North Idaho again. He's got his coffee and he's got his ritual, his work around the cabin, and with the new satellite dish Lydia buys him for his birthday, he's got nine hundred channels and he's got Netflix,

Jess Walter

#29. Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

Jess Walter

#30. Claire happy to no longer expect ... but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.

Jess Walter

#31. Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare.

Jess Walter

#32. I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

Jess Walter

#33. There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.

Jess Walter

#34. Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.

Jess Walter

#35. Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,' ... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.

Jess Walter

#36. Twenty meters away, Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. Or rather, he would think later, a dream's opposite: a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep.

Jess Walter

#37. True sacrifice is painless.

Jess Walter

#38. Make them want to give you the thing you're taking.

Jess Walter

#39. (Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English).

Jess Walter

#40. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet.

Jess Walter

#41. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.

Jess Walter

#42. He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.

Jess Walter

#43. I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.

Jess Walter

#44. That's why people write books and stories, no doubt, to leave some impression behind, to share a sense of the beauty and pain. This

Jess Walter

#45. Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means!" ~Alvis

Jess Walter

#46. His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.

Jess Walter

#47. Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

Jess Walter

#48. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.

Jess Walter

#49. Being alive isn't the same thing as living

Jess Walter

#50. You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why.
Fine. Here's why: Her. I did it all for her.

Jess Walter

#51. Among the world's evils - fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation - smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school.

Jess Walter

#52. I'm certainly eclectic in my writing.

Jess Walter

#53. Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?

Jess Walter

#54. You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person?

Jess Walter

#55. Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed.

Jess Walter

#56. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?

Jess Walter

#57. And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?

Jess Walter

#58. Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves.

Jess Walter

#59. If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet

Jess Walter

#60. The water. The feral cats scattered before her.

Jess Walter

#61. The eye sees everything upside down," the artist explained, "and then the brain automatically reverses it. I'm just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it." Alvis

Jess Walter

#62. I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.

Jess Walter

#63. If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah.

Jess Walter

#64. I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

Jess Walter

#65. Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping

Jess Walter

#66. ( ... ) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)

Jess Walter

#67. The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.

Jess Walter

#68. The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

Jess Walter

#69. ...life was a glorious catastrophe.

Jess Walter

#70. as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you.

Jess Walter

#71. Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.

Jess Walter

#72. And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of now - all those lovely wrecked lives.

Jess Walter

#73. My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.

Jess Walter

#74. He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

Jess Walter

#75. We live in a world of banal miracles.

Jess Walter

#76. All we have is the story we tell.

Jess Walter

#77. But it's not easy, realising how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realisation that the edge is so close to where we live.

Jess Walter

#78. My poems ... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

Jess Walter

#79. Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?"
"Redemption," Shane says.

Jess Walter

#80. My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.

Jess Walter

#81. My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.

Jess Walter

#82. No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac
if we've any luck at all.

Jess Walter

#83. There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there.

Jess Walter

#84. The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.

Jess Walter

#85. The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

Jess Walter

#86. What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough?

Jess Walter

#87. My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth.

Jess Walter

#88. I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'

Jess Walter

#89. These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.

Jess Walter

#90. I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

Jess Walter

#91. People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

Jess Walter

#92. Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains?

Jess Walter

#93. Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

Jess Walter

#94. (If I looked like you, Debra, I'd masturbate all the time

Jess Walter

#95. Then we'll make a deal, you and me. We'll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we'll smoke, if we want to swear, we'll swear. How does that sound?

Jess Walter