Peter Taylor > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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