Top 65 Padgett Powell Quotes
#1. Every other year, I was the new boy. I found that the only way to survive was to embrace it, make a little fortress on the outside and to pretend to blend in but not to invest too much because you'll be somewhere else next year.
Padgett Powell
#2. The main thing is: Don't take any shit.
That's the main thing.
The unmain thing is: You are not going to figure anything out except how to get other people to take shit, so forget about everything except not taking any yourself.
Padgett Powell
#3. Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart?
Padgett Powell
#4. In my experience, great reviews almost always ensure no sales.
Padgett Powell
#6. If I slip up and receive a good gift, I will not have given a good gift. This is probably a natural law that affects us all and needs a name. The Gift Reciprocal Law.
Padgett Powell
#7. Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,
Padgett Powell
#8. I sat down and wrote, 'Are your emotions pure? Are they the stuff of heroes or the alloyed mess of the beaten? How do you stand in relation to the potato?' And it was a lot of fun, and I kept going and woke up at some point in some horror that I had about 142 pages of this.
Padgett Powell
#9. Ease up. the day was rued when we came upon it, or when it came upon us, and beheld us marring the horizon, sitting here like unconquerable savages, men missing their dogs and talking pointlessly unless talk to the dead. let's sharpen something.
Padgett Powell
#10. I stuff animals I find; I do roadkill. They're strangely fun to have. They're like easy-to-control pets.
Padgett Powell
#11. Don't hesitate to insulate your house, especially the floor.
Padgett Powell
#12. When I write, I want something to sound good itself.
Padgett Powell
#13. Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.
Padgett Powell
#14. Do you try to listen to calssical music but feel you don't ever really advance past knowing it's better than it sounds?
Padgett Powell
#15. At every Christmas, I fail to remember the daughters' shoe sizes, and they are not growing, but grown. After ostensible hard thought about who needs what, I have failed to give good gifts; I have failed to receive good gifts.
Padgett Powell
#16. Alternate the theories you entertain about all things.
Padgett Powell
#18. Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.
Padgett Powell
#19. I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
Padgett Powell
#20. Have you decided yet what historical moment you would have most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?
Padgett Powell
#21. I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.
Padgett Powell
#22. I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.
Padgett Powell
#23. Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.
Padgett Powell
#24. But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling -- there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked -- that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten.
Padgett Powell
#25. Today is a good day to give no one a hard time about anything, or today is a good day to give everyone a hard time about everything.
Padgett Powell
#26. The new world may be in fact a very, very, very, very old world.
Padgett Powell
#27. Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.
Padgett Powell
#28. There's a lot of phones; but I'm out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there's not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.
Padgett Powell
#29. Many parks in Florida have information kiosks with colorful enamel signs showing the special flora and fauna in the park. The gopher tortoise, the scrub jay, the indigo snake. At no park with an indigo snake on its kiosk signs could I find an indigo.
Padgett Powell
#30. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Padgett Powell
#31. Life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody get your ass. and one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop up time with syllables.
Padgett Powell
#32. Can you imagine doing something in your life that will be fully satisfying and redeeming for your having tried to do it, whether you succeeded in it or failed, and that, correspondingly, would be fully shameful had you not tried to do it?
Padgett Powell
#33. I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.
Padgett Powell
#34. I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.
Padgett Powell
#35. In the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely.
Padgett Powell
#36. If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.
Padgett Powell
#37. Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?
Padgett Powell
#38. Military brats have this toughness: they're almost like orphans or foster children; they develop little mechanisms. It sets you up to look at things a little differently.
Padgett Powell
#40. You can't disturb a nobody with evidence he's a nobody. A nobody is not disturbed by anything significant.
Padgett Powell
#41. Heavy booze is a big time vacation, but you come back with a headache.
Padgett Powell
#42. Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.
Padgett Powell
#43. That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.
Padgett Powell
#44. I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
Padgett Powell
#45. I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.
Padgett Powell
#46. I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.
Padgett Powell
#47. I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.
Padgett Powell
#48. As a boy, I was a member of a club run by the famous reptile showman Ross Allen, and the club sent its members pseudoscientific papers mimeographed on construction paper with a three-hole punch.
Padgett Powell
#49. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.
Padgett Powell
#50. Disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness
Padgett Powell
#51. I know about the sweet home. I went to school with 'em boys, what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.
Padgett Powell
#52. The zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to denigrate the different.
Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men
Padgett Powell
#53. Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.
Padgett Powell
#54. They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.
Padgett Powell
#55. If the observation were made to you that "Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met," would you be inclined to agree?
Padgett Powell
#56. It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.
Padgett Powell
#57. If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?
Padgett Powell
#58. All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
Padgett Powell
#59. I was always the new kid, and I got to know the language and the politics of being on the outside, looking in. Never being in the clique - always being a student of the clique, a subversive, and I could look around and identify the other guys who were excluded.
Padgett Powell
#60. Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
Padgett Powell
#61. I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.
Padgett Powell
#62. If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.
Padgett Powell
#63. In a new world behave in a new way as a new man. unhorse the conquistador.
Padgett Powell
#64. I was a commercial roofer before this, until about age thirty. I will not work others under me and do not want to work under others.
Padgett Powell
#65. Try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person.
Padgett Powell
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