Robert Boswell Quotes

#1. Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

Robert Boswell

#2. Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

Robert Boswell

#3. You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

Robert Boswell

#4. Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.

Robert Boswell

#5. I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

Robert Boswell

#6. What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?

Robert Boswell

#7. Once this person this counselor at school, this LADY, if you know what I mean, told me that if you kept your nose to the grindstone you could be someone in the world, and I thought, Yeah someone with a fucked up nose.

Robert Boswell

#8. I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Robert Boswell

#9. The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way.

Robert Boswell

#10. Ideology is the light that creates darkness.

Robert Boswell

#11. Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

Robert Boswell

#12. Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

Robert Boswell

#13. We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

Robert Boswell

#14. I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

Robert Boswell