Top 100 Woodrell Quotes
#1. I think my grandmother Woodrell was most responsible for my becoming a writer. She wasn't quite literate, but was very proud that she attended school as far as the third grade. She worked as a maid, housekeeper and cook.
Daniel Woodrell
#2. Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.
Sarah Hall
#3. Woodrell's storytelling is as melodic, jangly and energetic as a good banjo riff ... Sammy Barlach's story is a tragedy, but the telling of it is a pleasure.
Valerie Sayers
#4. I know the Pollock novel. Read it last year and liked it. Daniel Woodrell is awesome. I especially like the book Winter's Bone, and the film made from it. Larry Brown is terrific, all his work, but for me Joe in particular, also a good film, but a much better novel.
Joe R. Lansdale
#5. I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.
Dennis Lehane
#6. As the ample Hedda, who disguised her ampleness behind a billow of yellow summer dress, told it, her life up 'til she hoisted this very bloody mary in her hand was a convoluted tale of bubbly love gone flat, fine talents unnoticed and similarly woeful bullshit.
Daniel Woodrell
#7. I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.
Daniel Woodrell
#8. I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
Daniel Woodrell
#9. Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?' 'Kill me, I guess.' 'That idea has been said already. Got'ny other ones?' 'Help me. Ain't nobody said that idea yet, have they?
Daniel Woodrell
#10. Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.
Daniel Woodrell
#11. I was born in West Plains, and we lived here till I was one. Then my dad needed to get a job, so we moved to the St. Louis area. I lived in St. Charles, on the Missouri River, till I was 15.
Daniel Woodrell
#13. This floor, here? I remember when this floor here used to get to jumping' like a fuckin' bunny from all the dancing'. Everybody dancing' around all night, stoned out of their minds - and it always was the happy kind of stoned back then.
Daniel Woodrell
#14. If you don't allow yourself to change from book to book - take chances - it turns into a dullish job with no health benefits or pension plan and only intermittent paychecks.
Daniel Woodrell
#16. I was basically raised to look for chances to get even with several families for stuff that happened 30 or 40 years before I was born.
Daniel Woodrell
#17. This happens to me all the time: I think I'm working on one thing, but this other thing, whether I want it to or not, keeps coming through.
Daniel Woodrell
#18. I don't want to be callous about it, but we all seemed to get over the Oklahoma bombing pretty quickly, and we're never going to get over 9/11.
Daniel Woodrell
#19. The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns.
Daniel Woodrell
#20. I think there are some folks who don't particularly like what I have to say, but on the whole, the reaction has been very positive.
Daniel Woodrell
#21. But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.
Daniel Woodrell
#22. I like the idea of everybody knowing each other; you know why you're doing things.
Daniel Woodrell
#23. For a long time, I didn't think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.
Daniel Woodrell
#24. Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.
Daniel Woodrell
#25. The bodies draped down through the leaves like rancid baubles in the locks of a horrible harlot.
Daniel Woodrell
#26. Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.
Daniel Woodrell
#27. Boys popped wheelies that landed very near the men, then exercised their audacity by requesting quarters to stop. "I could scuff your shoes for nothin'," they said, "but when a quarter's
Daniel Woodrell
#28. I had gone to enlist in the Navy, but they had a long waiting list and no need for high-school dropouts.
Daniel Woodrell
#29. Nobody here wants to be awful," he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. "It's just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.
Daniel Woodrell
#30. I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'
Daniel Woodrell
#31. We'd been living in the Arkansas Ozarks, then the Missouri Ozarks, because it is so inexpensive and does have natural wonders, but we shuffled things and moved to San Francisco, the corner of Dashiell Hammett and Pine.
Daniel Woodrell
#33. The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.
Daniel Woodrell
#34. Most of my characters aren't hillbillies anyway. Let's just call them proletariat with a disposition towards criminal activity.
Daniel Woodrell
#35. I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.
Daniel Woodrell
#36. It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.
Daniel Woodrell
#37. It's called 'The Outlaw Album,' not 'The Ozarks Album.' These are stories that delve into different kinds of outlawry, from criminal acts to interior, or psychological, outlawry. The book is not meant to be a tapestry of the Ozarks.
Daniel Woodrell
#38. Ledoux's face was pebbled with mosquito bites. Forget the Cutter's and that means every needle-nose bug in the woods spare-changing you for blood like cornerboy hustlers spotting a strung-out Kennedy trying to score on Seventh. Like you got plenty to give.
Daniel Woodrell
#39. I FELL DEEP down in there, until this bright light raised me from sleep. Coming out of a pit such as that, you think the bright light could be God or a cop on patrol.
Daniel Woodrell
#40. I'd get lost without the weight of you two on my shoulders.
Daniel Woodrell
#41. On his next return to this world, Duncan Cobb, oldest son, faithless cousin, cautious lover, and pal of killers, awoke infused with the lucidity born of no escape, and a mortal dose of honesty.
Daniel Woodrell
#42. I pulled the rearview down and looked at myself in the mirror for a spell, trying to spot virtues.
Daniel Woodrell
#43. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#44. I don't think I can write a book as nihilistic as some of my early ones. They're so bleak. I don't think I would enjoy that as much anymore. You really become fixated on ways out.
Daniel Woodrell
#45. I hate to fall back on weird to describe them, but goofy is too weak, and strange sounds too sensible.
Daniel Woodrell
#46. This new spot for life might be but a short journey as a winged creature covers it, that is often said, but, oh, Lord, as you know, I had not the wings, and it is a hot, hard ride by road.
Daniel Woodrell
#47. Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she'd clogged with peanuts and called a late lunch.
Daniel Woodrell
#48. You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.
Daniel Woodrell
#49. Honesty can siphon off a few regrets and resentments if you tap in to it. Let that sink in.
Daniel Woodrell
#50. In February of 1972, a snowstorm blew into Kansas City, and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike.
Daniel Woodrell
#51. The pain was shrill enough, but the idea of a finger of mine twitching about, lost in chicken-pecked dust, was more terrible.
Daniel Woodrell
#52. I can't say that dropping out of school at 16 to join the Marines was my best idea. On the other hand, maybe it was. Who knows?
Daniel Woodrell
#53. Tip began to nod, then shook his head. I could be eight kinds of crooked, there, piglet, but I ain't never been no kind of dumb.
Daniel Woodrell
#54. Before all that long, you start telling those near to you that you went on interviews that turned out sorry when factually you never even made the phone call.
Daniel Woodrell
#55. I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.
Daniel Woodrell
#57. Mike Rondeau, a tall drink of a man sloshed into a squat glass, with a belt that could double as a lasso and a volume of ambitious lies that he called his life, came in the door and laughed.
Daniel Woodrell
#58. I rise near dawn, make a strong cup of coffee, wander to my desk and come fully awake by reading something written the day before.
Daniel Woodrell
#59. Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.
Daniel Woodrell
#60. I felt like a number of things in me as a writer just clicked.
Daniel Woodrell
#61. I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.
Daniel Woodrell
#62. I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.
Daniel Woodrell
#63. It was in a grim room on Eddy Street that I finally opened 'A Moveable Feast.' I read it all overnight. I read it again the next day.
Daniel Woodrell
#64. The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family
that's the always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.
Daniel Woodrell
#66. Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western.
Daniel Woodrell
#67. Babies don't know anything but nipples and lullabies. they splash out looks of wonder on anybody whether they merit it or not.
Daniel Woodrell
#68. He was a man with a tin-ear present who dreamed of a rock-opera future.
Daniel Woodrell
#69. I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.
Daniel Woodrell
#70. I'm not from the movie world. I'm from the book world.
Daniel Woodrell
#71. When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.
Daniel Woodrell
#72. I realized there might be monetary or financial reasons to jump in and write a 'Winter's Bone Retriumphs' or something, and nobody would object to me doing that in publishing. But it would be a waste of my time, and they always take a little longer than you thought they would take.
Daniel Woodrell
#73. There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.
Daniel Woodrell
#74. Oys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits, Shocking us would have required some kind of genius.
Woe To Live On
Daniel Woodrell
#75. I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.
Daniel Woodrell
#76. I came back when I'd had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks.
Daniel Woodrell
#77. Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.
Daniel Woodrell
#78. The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.
Daniel Woodrell
#79. When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.
Daniel Woodrell
#80. Grunt work is my main calling, but I like to be dead when I do it.
Daniel Woodrell
#81. I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.
Daniel Woodrell
#82. Your palms break sweat and you sit there, needy, while your work ethic and character are available for comment from strangers you wouldn't share a joint with at a blues festival.
Daniel Woodrell
#83. If I weren't so lazy, I would have 14 books, not eight.
Daniel Woodrell
#84. The town of St. Charles near St. Louis was founded by a trapper named Blanchette. There is a section that's called Frenchtown on historical markers.
Daniel Woodrell
#85. I learned my values. It's better to be poor than to be beholden. Wealth is not the object of life. You should be polite as long as possible, and when you can't be polite anymore, don't run.
Daniel Woodrell
#86. Wanda Bone Bouvier had that thing that makes a hound leap against its cage. It ws a quality that was partly a bonus from nature and partly learned from cheesecake calendars and Tanya Tucker albums.
Daniel Woodrell
#87. You realize you're alive while you're alive, and you better notice it then, because later, it's hard to see.
Daniel Woodrell
#88. Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you've had sex with. A person you've licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.
Daniel Woodrell
#89. Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.
Daniel Woodrell
#91. I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.
Daniel Woodrell
#93. I joined the Marines the week I turned 17, and that led to a few experiences that might qualify as adventure - eye of the beholder.
Daniel Woodrell
#94. Stained raincoats, I reckon." "And shitpaper stuck to their shoes.
Daniel Woodrell
#95. Taggin' that name on you, that was like casting a curse on you. Oh, baby, your ma made a sorry, shitty prediction on your whole life and hung a name on you that would help the sorry, shitty stuff come true."
"You ain't bringin' me any news.
Daniel Woodrell
#96. Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss.
Daniel Woodrell
#97. I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.
Daniel Woodrell
#98. You want to hear an agent scream, say, 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'
Daniel Woodrell
#99. I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
Daniel Woodrell
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