Top 100 Jess Walter Quotes
#1. That's why people write books and stories, no doubt, to leave some impression behind, to share a sense of the beauty and pain. This
Jess Walter
#2. You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.
Jess Walter
#3. You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why.
Fine. Here's why: Her. I did it all for her.
Jess Walter
#4. He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.
Jess Walter
#5. Being alive isn't the same thing as living
Jess Walter
#6. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.
Jess Walter
#7. I love humor in writing, so I've written to the thing that's funny, there's the joke, but then I just kept going. I started thinking about all the bikes I've had stolen, and that got me thinking about crime, and that got me thinking about the city I'm in.
Jess Walter
#8. You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married.
Jess Walter
#9. I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
Jess Walter
#10. Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.
Jess Walter
#11. I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events.
Jess Walter
#12. His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.
Jess Walter
#13. Your parents don't get to tell your story. Your sisters don't. When he's old enough, even Pat doesn't get to tell your story. I'm your husband and I don't even get to tell it. So I don't care how lovesick this director is, he doesn't tell it. ... No one gets to tell you what your life means!" ~Alvis
Jess Walter
#14. Among the world's evils - fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation - smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school.
Jess Walter
#15. I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.
Jess Walter
#16. Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life
not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment.
Jess Walter
#17. He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live.
Jess Walter
#18. I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift ... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.
Jess Walter
#19. This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet.
Jess Walter
#20. and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing -
Jess Walter
#21. God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is.
Jess Walter
#22. I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
Jess Walter
#23. (Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English).
Jess Walter
#24. Make them want to give you the thing you're taking.
Jess Walter
#25. Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.
Jess Walter
#26. And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?
Jess Walter
#27. Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping
Jess Walter
#28. Whole worlds exist beneath the surface. And maybe you can't see down there, Michael thought, but there's a part of you that knows.
Jess Walter
#29. I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.
Jess Walter
#30. It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire.
Jess Walter
#31. Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.
Jess Walter
#32. If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah.
Jess Walter
#33. I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.
Jess Walter
#34. I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.
Jess Walter
#35. The eye sees everything upside down," the artist explained, "and then the brain automatically reverses it. I'm just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it." Alvis
Jess Walter
#36. The water. The feral cats scattered before her.
Jess Walter
#37. If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet
Jess Walter
#38. Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves.
Jess Walter
#41. I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.
Jess Walter
#42. My dad worked for 40 years in an aluminum plant. I don't think he ever got aluminum block.
Jess Walter
#43. At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?
Jess Walter
#44. Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed.
Jess Walter
#45. You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person?
Jess Walter
#46. And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant
how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.
Jess Walter
#47. Guterak looked over. "Hey, you got your hair cut." "Yeah." Remy put the cap back on. "What made you do that?" "I shot myself in the head last night." "Well." Paul drove quietly for a moment, staring straight ahead. "It looks good.
Jess Walter
#48. Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?
Jess Walter
#50. The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
Jess Walter
#51. There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.
Jess Walter
#52. Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.
Jess Walter
#53. The whole world is sick ... we've all got this pathetic need to be seen. We're a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention.
Jess Walter
#54. If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.
Jess Walter
#55. And I wonder if we don't live like water
seeking a level
a low bed
until one day we just go dry.
I wonder if a creek ever realizes
it has made its own grave.
Jess Walter
#56. All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?
Jess Walter
#57. Our lives have a way of eddying back on themselves, offering us the same view over and over, daring us to get it right just once.
Jess Walter
#58. The form is so malleable and can do so many things.
Jess Walter
#60. First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone - )
Jess Walter
#61. Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.
Jess Walter
#62. The scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound
when the truth was tat it had all been done a million billion times.
Jess Walter
#63. Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming?
Jess Walter
#64. He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.
Jess Walter
#65. I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves.
Jess Walter
#66. What business does memory have with time?
Jess Walter
#67. Always speak first to the toughest person in the room.
Jess Walter
#69. Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't
and perhaps loses track of just where she is.
Jess Walter
#71. He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement.
Jess Walter
#72. Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out.
Jess Walter
#73. In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work?
Jess Walter
#74. And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.
Jess Walter
#75. She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her
Jess Walter
#76. Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
Jess Walter
#77. Twenty meters away, Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. Or rather, he would think later, a dream's opposite: a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep.
Jess Walter
#78. Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,' ... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book.
Jess Walter
#79. Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all.
Jess Walter
#80. For several seconds, they stand there, ... just four feet apart now, but separated by a thick granite counter, by fifty years and two fully lived lives. No one speaks. No one breathes.
Jess Walter
#81. Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
Jess Walter
#82. We want what we want - we love who we love.
Jess Walter
#83. There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.
Jess Walter
#84. Imagine truth as a chain of great mountains, their tops way up in the clouds. Writers explore these truths, always looking out for new paths up these peaks.
Jess Walter
#85. I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.
Jess Walter
#86. And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking
how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe
Pasquale Tursi said, only, Yes.
Jess Walter
#87. Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare.
Jess Walter
#88. Claire happy to no longer expect ... but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.
Jess Walter
#89. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#90. I guess I forgot we were going out tonight."
"We always go out on Fridays."
"It's Thursday, Alvis."
"You are so tied to routine.
Jess Walter
#91. I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
Jess Walter
#92. Imagine never leaving North Idaho again. He's got his coffee and he's got his ritual, his work around the cabin, and with the new satellite dish Lydia buys him for his birthday, he's got nine hundred channels and he's got Netflix,
Jess Walter
#93. With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way.
Jess Walter
#94. Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.
Jess Walter
#95. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ...
Jess Walter
#96. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?
Jess Walter
#97. Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.
Jess Walter
#98. She laughed. 'That's what I love about you good-lookin' blokes. What, me? Have sex?
Jess Walter
#100. Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle.
Jess Walter
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