Top 34 Allan Gurganus Quotes
#1. I can't remember who said it - I think it was Allan Gurganus when he was visiting the Michener Center - but he told us to "spend [our] gold," meaning, put everything you have into a story. Other "gold" will be waiting for you for your next project.
Mary J. Miller
#2. Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever.
Allan Gurganus
#3. Till the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, most American men wore hats to work. What happened? Did our guys - suddenly scouting overhead for worse Sunday raids - come to fear their hatbrims' interference?
Allan Gurganus
#4. The chances of achieving literary performance are, to the decimal point, the odds against becoming fully human.
That means one hundred and fifty million to one.
Which means one hundred and fifty million in one.
Allan Gurganus
#5. I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.
Allan Gurganus
#6. After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.
Allan Gurganus
#7. I was born in Rocky Mount, NC. The town of 24,000 proved a great place to spend the first 17 years of life. But, after that, onward, outward.
Allan Gurganus
#8. Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell.
Allan Gurganus
#9. When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.
Allan Gurganus
#10. You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
Allan Gurganus
#11. I don't think anybody who has any wisdom regrets a minute of their life, as long as it takes you to the next minute, when things get a little better, and even when it doesn't.
Allan Gurganus
#12. Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.
Allan Gurganus
#14. We'd die here, old together, safe with each other's secrets. We were each other's juvenilia
Allan Gurganus
#15. Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.
Allan Gurganus
#16. To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.
Allan Gurganus
#17. 'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.
Allan Gurganus
#18. The tree feels splintery, nasty to my touch; it feels Floridian, more reptile than vegetable, more stucco than stone. I do loathe this state, their Elba.
Allan Gurganus
#19. Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.
Allan Gurganus
#20. Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.
Allan Gurganus
#21. I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of 'The New York Times.' It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread.
Allan Gurganus
#22. For anybody living out their twenties, Sex and Career remain major topics: being sexy can help give you a career, and having a career can make others finally find you sexier.
Allan Gurganus
#23. Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of eve none of mine. A huge bronze bell deprived of one hidden small iron clapper, its sole reason for being, its single means of song.
Allan Gurganus
#24. You know, right often, the body is the best thing we've got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!
Allan Gurganus
#25. The visit has commenced. The box step, three-quarter waltz time. No fast moves or sudden stops.
Allan Gurganus
#26. People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things.
Allan Gurganus
#27. I started thinking of my absentee diamond. My thumb and little finger kept reaching for their pet and sidekick.
Allan Gurganus
#28. Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
Allan Gurganus
#30. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
Allan Gurganus
#31. Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
Allan Gurganus
#32. I'm a great admirer of Primo Levi's work. It's always mind-boggling, the idea of how much pain people can endure and still come back from the edge with a sense of humor, with this tremendous animal desire we have to get on with life.
Allan Gurganus
#33. There's a kind of ear music ... a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.
Allan Gurganus
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