Top 92 Charles Baxter Quotes
#1. The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.
Charles Baxter
#2. You'll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won't have a chance against me until you're very old, if then.
Charles Baxter
#4. There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
Charles Baxter
#6. I quoted to him what I remembered of Charles Darwin: "'Judging by the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity ... '"
"Darwin was right," Nebogipfel said gently.
Stephen Baxter
#7. I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway.
Charles Baxter
#8. He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.
Charles Baxter
#9. Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
Charles Baxter
#10. When you're in love you don't have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don't have to move an inch.
Charles Baxter
#11. The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.
Charles Baxter
#12. She has a winning smile. She wins, she always wins.
Charles Baxter
#13. It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.
Charles Baxter
#14. Once someone has bound your heart, he's the only person who can let it loose again.
Charles Baxter
#15. Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes.
Charles Baxter
#16. The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.
Charles Baxter
#17. As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
Charles Baxter
#18. The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.
Charles Baxter
#19. When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.
Charles Baxter
#21. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God's more complicated pranks.
Charles Baxter
#23. Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)
Charles Baxter
#25. I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.
Charles Baxter
#26. Game of deducing a person's character from that person's appearance is an old pastime with racists and with those who seek an advantage over the poor or the ugly, the disabled, or any underrepresented minority.
Charles Baxter
#27. Making love to him was like going through a car wash, except you came out dirtier and more alive at the other end.
Charles Baxter
#29. You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.
Charles Baxter
#30. You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.
Charles Baxter
#31. You can not figure out love without figuring out death, too, but the effort it takes can knock the wind out of you. Love is the first cousin of death, they're acquainted with each other, they go to the same family reunions.
Charles Baxter
#32. The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
Charles Baxter
#33. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.
Charles Baxter
#35. You fall in love with someone not because he's nice to you or can read your mind but because, when he kisses you, your knees weaken, or because you can't stop looking at his skin or at the way his legs, inside his jeans, shape the fabric.
Charles Baxter
#36. If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.
Charles Baxter
#37. At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
Charles Baxter
#40. It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.
Charles Baxter
#41. So bleary with jet lag that she could not sleep or make any sense in conversation, and feeling that her brain was a haunted house in which bats flew randomly from one attic beam to another,
Charles Baxter
#42. Do you read, Mr. Quinn?" he asked. "Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.
Charles Baxter
#43. When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.
Charles Baxter
#45. Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Charles Baxter
#46. Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.
Charles Baxter
#47. What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
Charles Baxter
#48. I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.
Charles Baxter
#49. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved.
Charles Baxter
#51. When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.
Charles Baxter
#52. You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.
Charles Baxter
#53. and behind them the quivering mucosity of her tongue.
Charles Baxter
#55. The loss of innocence, and the arrival of knowingness, can become an addiction.
Charles Baxter
#56. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it.
Charles Baxter
#57. Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.
Charles Baxter
#58. We fear to trust our wings. We plume and feather them, but dare not throw our weight upon them. We cling too often to the perch.
Charles Newcomb Baxter
#59. Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.
Charles Baxter
#60. His was the kind of beauty for which you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow and all the varieties of rage. Eventually, you would have to go to church to get rid of him.
Charles Baxter
#61. It helps that in michigan everyone goes inside from november through april. but from may until october they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in.
Charles Baxter
#62. Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me.
Charles Baxter
#63. As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch.
Charles Baxter
#64. To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn't believe in giving advice, even when asked.
Charles Baxter
#65. He gave the impression of being clean and dry as though he had been pressed between two large blotters which had absorbed all his vital juices.
Charles Baxter
#66. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter
#67. Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
Charles Baxter
#68. [T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
Charles Baxter
#69. After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.
Charles Baxter
#70. The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.
Charles Baxter
#71. Charm sometimes has a habit of taking its leave of you. (p.256)
Charles Baxter
#73. Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.
Charles Baxter
#74. Hell is the proof of God's failure or refusal to love.
Charles Baxter
#76. In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising.
Charles Baxter
#77. If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.
Charles Baxter
#79. A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
Charles Baxter
#80. There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.
Charles Baxter
#81. In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.
Charles Baxter
#82. My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
Charles Baxter
#83. I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.
Charles Baxter
#84. At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
Charles Baxter
#85. I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
Charles Baxter
#86. Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in the front row of a theater, where the actors' spit lands on your face.
Charles Baxter
#88. You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.
Charles Baxter
#89. I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.
Charles Baxter
#91. Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
Charles Baxter
#92. When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.
Charles Baxter
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