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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
...life was a glorious catastrophe. -- Jess Walter
Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?"
"Redemption," Shane says. -- Jess Walter
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. -- Jess Walter
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
All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story! -- Jess Walter
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
The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize. -- Jess Walter
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. -- Jess Walter
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
There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there. -- Jess Walter
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
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
These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret. -- Jess Walter
On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world. -- Jess Walter
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
She was asleep, that blond hair swirled like butter on the pillow beneath her -- Jess Walter
The form is so malleable and can do so many things. -- Jess Walter
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
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. -- Jess Walter
She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to. -- Jess Walter
Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for awhile, we're less alone. -- Jess Walter
You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married. -- Jess Walter
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
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
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
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
Claire happy to no longer expect ... but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life. -- Jess Walter
It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn't see each other's faces. -- Jess Walter
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
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
My poems ... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes. -- Jess Walter
His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about. -- Jess Walter
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
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
You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it. -- Jess Walter
And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of now - all those lovely wrecked lives. -- Jess Walter
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
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
Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? -- Jess Walter
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
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
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. Pasquale waited until the -- Jess Walter
A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea."
"That's only three."
Alvis finished his wine. "You have to do disappointment twice. -- Jess Walter
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
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
True sacrifice is painless. -- Jess Walter
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
The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25. -- Jess Walter
What business does memory have with time? -- Jess Walter
Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together. -- Jess Walter
There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors. -- Jess Walter
If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out. -- Jess Walter
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
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
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
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
Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing. -- Jess Walter
He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon. -- Jess Walter
The more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe -- Jess Walter
My dad worked for 40 years in an aluminum plant. I don't think he ever got aluminum block. -- Jess Walter
We want what we want -- Jess Walter
Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all. -- Jess Walter
Being alive isn't the same thing as living -- Jess Walter
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
Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it. -- Jess Walter
He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live. -- Jess Walter
She laughed. 'That's what I love about you good-lookin' blokes. What, me? Have sex? -- Jess Walter
Stories are nations, empires. -- Jess Walter
Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief. -- Jess Walter
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
( ... ) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves) -- Jess Walter
The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about. -- Jess Walter
But it's not easy, realising how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realisation that the edge is so close to where we live. -- Jess Walter
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.' -- Jess Walter
Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping -- Jess Walter
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. -- Jess Walter
Among the world's evils - fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation - smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school. -- Jess Walter
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
Divination of true nature. Of motivation. Of desirous hearts. I saw the whole world in a flash and I recognized it at once: We want what we want. -- Jess Walter
On the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . . -- Jess Walter
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
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. -- Jess Walter
Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out. -- Jess Walter
Then we'll make a deal, you and me. We'll do and say exactly what we mean. And to hell with what anyone thinks about it. If we want to smoke, we'll smoke, if we want to swear, we'll swear. How does that sound? -- Jess Walter
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
Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. -- Jess Walter
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. -- Jess Walter
And he waited - as he always had - for life to come and find him. -- Jess Walter
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
I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years. -- Jess Walter
We live in a world of banal miracles. -- Jess Walter
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
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. -- Jess Walter
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
What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? -- Jess Walter
Always speak first to the toughest person in the room. -- Jess Walter
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
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
My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth. -- Jess Walter
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
Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming? -- Jess Walter
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
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
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
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. -- Jess Walter
I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events. -- Jess Walter
Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers. -- Jess Walter
And now there are two distinct phases to sex with Daryl: the first two minutes like an exam from an autistic gynecologist, the next ten a visit from the Roto-Rooter man. -- Jess Walter
(Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). -- Jess Walter
It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used. -- Jess Walter
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
Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves. -- Jess Walter
You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person? -- Jess Walter
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead? -- Jess Walter
Make them want to give you the thing you're taking. -- Jess Walter
If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent. -- Jess Walter
Maybe all love is hopeless. -- Jess Walter
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
No one gets to tell you what your life means! -- Jess Walter
God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is. -- Jess Walter
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
Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith. -- Jess Walter
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
Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. -- Jess Walter
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination. -- Jess Walter
He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision. -- Jess Walter
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
And we want car wrecks. We say we don't. But we love them. To look is to love. A thousand people drive past the statue of David. Two hundred look. A thousand people drive past a car wreck. A thousand look. -- Jess Walter
I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself. -- Jess Walter
If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah. -- Jess Walter
And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exacting part, the action? It's all so fast. -- Jess Walter
Before Pat could speak, the kid -- Jess Walter
If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet -- Jess Walter
This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet. -- Jess Walter
With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way. -- Jess Walter
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
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
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
I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written. -- Jess Walter
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
Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it. -- Jess Walter
(If I looked like you, Debra, I'd masturbate all the time -- Jess Walter
Pure talent and charisma and like gods they were terrible together. Awful. A gorgeous nightmare. -- Jess Walter
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
It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire. -- Jess Walter
I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories. -- Jess Walter
The water. The feral cats scattered before her. -- Jess Walter
Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed. -- Jess Walter
I'm certainly eclectic in my writing. -- Jess Walter
All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point? -- Jess Walter
We want what we want - we love who we love. -- Jess Walter
fierce tonight. Insistent. -- Jess Walter
All we have is the story we tell. -- Jess Walter
as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you. -- Jess Walter
My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house. -- Jess Walter
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. -- Jess Walter
Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through. -- Jess Walter
I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction. -- Jess Walter
The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story. -- Jess Walter
No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac
if we've any luck at all. -- Jess Walter
You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view. -- Jess Walter
He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment. -- Jess Walter
There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring? In -- Jess Walter