Top 25 Jess Walter Quotes

I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: ‘It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.’

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer’s palette. I suppose I’m in the minority but I think it’s crazy for ‘literary fiction’ to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and immediately fell in love.

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.

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.

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.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

I probably would have gone the M.F.A. route except I was a dad at 19, and it made more sense to go to work for a newspaper and support a kid that way. But the funny thing is, that detour became the most important step in my developing as a novelist.

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.

My poems… the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

With Facebook and Twitter, we’re all our own little publicists in a way.

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well.

I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, ‘second breakfast,’ or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can’t get to.

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.

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I’m attuned to current events.

I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we’re not really a culture geared to anything as humble as ‘learning.’ But I was disappointed in how quickly everyone wanted to get back to normal. It was as if we watched terrorism on TV for a while, then got bored and turned back to ‘American Idol.’

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay – these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

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.

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.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don’t think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.

Often, the fact that I haven’t done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.

I’ve been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

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.

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.