Top 73 T.C. Boyle Quotes
#1. Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.
T.C. Boyle
#2. Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?
T.C. Boyle
#3. Everything we do is escapism, because we'll all be dead and everything we do is completely meaningless. Why brush your teeth? Why not be in the park with the bums passing a short dog? Why pay taxes, why get educated? Of course literature is an escape. You have to fill the hours.
T.C. Boyle
#4. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.
T.C. Boyle
#5. I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.
T.C. Boyle
#6. would be hell to pay when he got home. But the devil was in the back seat, keeping time to the music, and hell was a long way up the road.
T.C. Boyle
#7. The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.
T.C. Boyle
#8. Constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe
T.C. Boyle
#9. Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
T.C. Boyle
#10. I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.
T.C. Boyle
#11. He'd been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn't feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate,
T.C. Boyle
#12. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
#13. First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
T.C. Boyle
#14. Survival Movement in Hostile Areas," most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS: B - Blends in with the surroundings L - Low in silhouette I - Irregular in shape S - Small in size S - Secluded
T.C. Boyle
#15. You're not getting the joy out of literature that it gave you. This is the danger of what we do. Look at Hemingway and so many others. You devote your life to one thing, that is what you are. It's artificial but it's all you have. If you lose it, then you're nothing and there's no point in going on.
T.C. Boyle
#16. To be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of man.
T.C. Boyle
#17. Especially students. I love to turn them on to a story. Some of them have to go see me as an assignment, like kids from the schools in New York will go to the Y. I want them to know why I love this and why they should too.
T.C. Boyle
#18. I like to joke that you usually write more books before death than after death, so that's why I'm doing it. But really, I remain engaged with ideas. There are so many things happening that turn me on and I just want to examine them.
T.C. Boyle
#19. Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
T.C. Boyle
#20. The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.
T.C. Boyle
#21. Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.
T.C. Boyle
#22. One of the problems I have with many writers is their stories are all somewhat similar. They might be very good, but they're always on the same turf. I don't have those limitations.
T.C. Boyle
#23. I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions.
T.C. Boyle
#24. The hardest part is always the middle of anything because at that point, on some unconscious level, you have to figure out what it's about and why you're doing it and what it means. You don't know that in the beginning.
T.C. Boyle
#25. So he learned to look like he was working when he worked. He learned to act like a father when his daughter was around, to look like a husband when Marnie needed a husband. He did what people expected him to or maybe a little more.
T.C. Boyle
#26. There's a kind of mystery to our being and from my point of view, regarding my own parents and their parents, I'd as soon let it lie than find out who my mother's father was.
T.C. Boyle
#27. I go around with my books so much and I love to perform on stage, to remind everybody that the lights are off, the phones are off, and for this hour, it's going to be like your mother reading to you. We're going to remember why we love stories. I think that gets lost in over-intellectualizing.
T.C. Boyle
#28. He wanted to talk about her-he was full of her-but he was telling a fine line here.He and Terry were men of the world and men of the world didn't moon over their woman.
T.C. Boyle
#29. I've been in perfect health and perfectly happy all my life. I don't take any pills; I just get up, clean up after my wife, and start typing every day.
T.C. Boyle
#30. Criticism can be wonderful, especially in making connections in an interpretive way. But by applying theories randomly, it's an interesting exercise, but I don't think it illuminates the literature.
T.C. Boyle
#31. The golf course. He never thought he'd sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land.
T.C. Boyle
#32. This was what he was born for. This was what made sense. The only thing.
T.C. Boyle
#33. He dug wells for a living and his customers were cattle ranchers and wheat farmers, which meant they were always about to go broke, except when they were rich.
T.C. Boyle
#34. All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.
T.C. Boyle
#35. These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense.
T.C. Boyle
#36. I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.
T.C. Boyle
#37. If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
T.C. Boyle
#39. I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world.
T.C. Boyle
#40. But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
T.C. Boyle
#41. I was not okay for one thing.For another, I'd passed from simple misanthropy to nihilism, death of the spirit and beyond.
T.C. Boyle
#42. Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.
T.C. Boyle
#43. I've always been a huge fan of theatre and performance. The idea of just the human voice and just this night. Live music is the same. They're doing it for you right now. It's an amazing thing. And if you perform a story properly, it can be a transporting, too.
T.C. Boyle
#44. They wore each other like a pair of socks.
From Love of my Life
T.C. Boyle
#45. At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.
T.C. Boyle
#46. She didn't recognize him and he didn't recognize her, because people and places change and what once was will never be again.
T.C. Boyle
#47. Nothing moves around, it just goes straight from the start to the end. The final draft on the final day, that's it, same for the novels. What I turn in is what you see. There are some exceptions, but almost always I can see exactly what it's going to be.
T.C. Boyle
#48. I always listen to music while I'm working and I always read aloud to my wife. I love to read aloud to an audience because there's a cadence and a beat. There's a music to the language that's very important to me.
T.C. Boyle
#49. We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.
T.C. Boyle
#50. Work saved me. Literature saved me. It sounds corny but it's absolutely true. I was going in the wrong direction, but after the 9,000th night at the bar doing dope with a bunch of Dead Heads, I began to think there was something more.
T.C. Boyle
#51. I think if you read all my books you know where I stand, pretty much. You could probably give the reader a questionnaire and they could figure out what I'm about. But I don't think my job is to tell you that.
T.C. Boyle
#52. A mother's rage was too incandescent to blaze unshaded.
T.C. Boyle
#53. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.
'It's been fun,' she said.
'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.
She was wearing gloves.
T.C. Boyle
#54. If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story?
T.C. Boyle
#55. Besides, to like something, to really like it and come out and say so, is taking a terrible risk. I mean, what if I'm wrong? What if it's really no good?
T.C. Boyle
#56. Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace.
T.C. Boyle
#57. I'm extremely worried. I'm worried about the survival of our species, worried about what we're doing, worried about being Americans, worried about depletion of resources. On the other hand, we are trying. We are trying to understand our impact on the environment.
T.C. Boyle
#58. A glad zest and hopefulness might be inspired even in the most jaded and ennui-cursed, were there in our homes such simple, truthful natures as that of my heroine, and it is in the sphere of quiet homes - not elsewhere - I believe that a woman can best rule and save the world.
T.C. Boyle
#59. I'm pretty hardcore. I stick exactly to what I'm doing. So I write a novel in one period, and then I'll write stories in another period. I only work on one thing at once, because I'm afraid that I wouldn't finish what I'd started.
T.C. Boyle
#60. But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?
T.C. Boyle
#61. Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.
T.C. Boyle
#62. The reason we love nature is because it's fascinating and we love all the creatures, but if you watch any nature film, there's always a lesson: "the creatures are all dying and life sucks." The same is true of literature.
T.C. Boyle
#63. I'm always trying to do something different and trying to keep myself amused.
T.C. Boyle
#64. ... I thought I'd never seen such a miracle as the way the muscles of her thighs and buttocks flexed and relaxed in the grip of her jeans.
T.C. Boyle
#65. They [my stories] evolve. If they're tightly constructed, it's because they're revised constantly as I move forward each day. That's where the structure inheres. It's all organic.
T.C. Boyle
#66. I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
T.C. Boyle
#67. A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.
T.C. Boyle
#68. If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.
T.C. Boyle
#69. Three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car.
T.C. Boyle
#70. It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely.
T.C. Boyle
#71. I'd read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do?
T.C. Boyle
#72. Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.
T.C. Boyle
#73. There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.
T.C. Boyle
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