Peter Taylor > Quotes

“Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one’s parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process. I kept repeating this to myself, as though it were a lesson I would at some future time be accountable for. A certain oblivion was what we must undergo in order to become adults and live peacefully with ourselves.”
― Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis

“You can tell a man is clever by his answers – you can tell a man is wise by his questions.”
― Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager and The Project from Hell

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
― Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager and The Project from Hell

“My own view of Father was not nearly so high-flown or complicated. For me he was flesh and blood and until the day I left Memphis behind, to take up residence in Manhattan, he remained simply a barrier between me and any independent life I might aspire to- a barrier to any pursuit of ideas, interests, goals that my temperament guided me toward.”
― Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis

“The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression.’ John Harvey Jones”
― Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager and The Project from Hell

“• If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.”
― Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager and The Project from Hell

“I’ve always had a dislike of any form of didacticism, especially when it becomes the dominant element in writing. Character and emotional content should always be the strong elements. I think that was maybe what went wrong with my early novel, that I wanted it to be too profound, I was trying to put too much into it. I learned fairly early that one can handle only so much idea in a story. Well, or rather, I can!”
― Peter Taylor

“I feel strongly against professionalism, against someone’s feeling he has to write a book every year to keep his name before the public. I see people processing themselves, torturing themselves, for that, rather than writing out of a compulsion some story from their own experience, their own feelings. That’s the way you should write, unless you are just practicing. I tell young writers to steal a plot or an idea or whatever, just to get going. See how a character comes out, how you fit it into your life . . . You see great writers doing it too.”
― Peter Taylor

“But maybe it was only that Father was thinking that he must arrive in Memphis with the entire family household intact if he was to make a new go of things...He did enter so, and perhaps that is what sustained him in the years immediately afterward, sustained him and in some degree destroyed the rest of us.”
― Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis

“Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one's parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process.”
― Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis

“One makes advances. You do! You come to see what your story is like. That’s part of the fun: to see how you can get the other elements that are not your natural interests or concerns primarily.”
― Peter Taylor

“Any project can be estimated accurately (once it’s completed).”
― Peter Taylor, The Lazy Project Manager and The Project from Hell

“I think trying to write is a religious exercise. You are trying to understand life, and you can only get the illusion of doing it fully by writing. That is, it’s the only way I can come to understand things fully. When I create, when I put my own mark on something and form it, I begin to know the whole truth about it, how it was put together. Then you can begin to change things around. You know all this after you have written a lot. You really know. And it has become the most important thing in your life. It has nothing to do with craft, or even art, in a way. It is making sense of life. It is coming to understand yourself.”
― Peter Taylor

“I think he is the ornament of society! Oh, there is not just one role for the artist in society. He has many roles and he has a different role as society changes, and in different societies . . . He can be a seer at times, and in the eighteenth century he was the satirist, the artist stepping back and holding up the mirror to society. Moreover, I don’t think the same kind of person is necessarily an artist or a poet in one century as another.”
― Peter Taylor

“I quote Frank O’Connor to my students: that when you are writing a story, at some point the story must take over. You are not going to be able to control it. I think this is true. O’Connor said he thought Joyce controls his stories too tightly—“Whoever heard of a Joyce story taking over?” he asked—and that there is a deadness about them. You have got to keep the story opened up, let the story take over at some point.”
― Peter Taylor