Charles Baxter Quotes

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

There is no weather in malls.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

Everybody should customize their names.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made, " you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

Ethics is a dream.