Robert Olen Butler Quotes

#1. Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

Robert Olen Butler

#2. The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.

Robert Olen Butler

#3. The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into the unconscious ... Because you have learned it so well you have forgotten it.

Robert Olen Butler

#4. All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

Robert Olen Butler

#5. The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

Robert Olen Butler

#6. We are the yearning creatures of this planet.

Robert Olen Butler

#7. The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.

Robert Olen Butler

#8. Jayne Anne Phillips ... is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite ... This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.

Robert Olen Butler