Top 36 Stewart O'Nan Quotes
#1. Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.
Stewart O'Nan
#2. Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women
all people, finally
complicated?
Stewart O'Nan
#3. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.
Stewart O'Nan
#4. The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
Stewart O'Nan
#5. My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'
Stewart O'Nan
#6. No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.
Stewart O'Nan
#7. Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.
Stewart O'Nan
#9. To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.
Stewart O'Nan
#10. For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.
Stewart O'Nan
#11. You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole
like the world, or the person you loved.
Stewart O'Nan
#12. The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he'd done the same.
Stewart O'Nan
#13. I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.
Stewart O'Nan
#14. She didn't want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar
Stewart O'Nan
#16. What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?
Stewart O'Nan
#17. He means people who let their faith take the place of their reason, people who believe this world is just a prelude to another, more glorious life. He means people like you. *
Stewart O'Nan
#18. She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island
but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.
Stewart O'Nan
#19. Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead ... Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms.
Stewart O'Nan
#20. The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.
Stewart O'Nan
#21. I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.
Stewart O'Nan
#22. The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.
Stewart O'Nan
#23. I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.
Stewart O'Nan
#24. The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
Stewart O'Nan
#25. I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
Stewart O'Nan
#26. If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.
Stewart O'Nan
#27. The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.
Stewart O'Nan
#28. All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they're true or invented, legend or fact.
Stewart O'Nan
#29. When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.
Stewart O'Nan
#30. He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn't come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor ...
Stewart O'Nan
#31. Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.
Stewart O'Nan
#32. The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
Stewart O'Nan
#33. It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.
Stewart O'Nan
#34. As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.
Stewart O'Nan
#35. Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' - which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was - losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
Stewart O'Nan
#36. Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.
Stewart O'Nan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
