Heidi Pitlor > Quotes

“The daylight, he remembered, was a sort of medicine. Truly nothing was as acute or upsetting in the first light of day.”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Daylight Marriage

“Mom’s got this secret fear that if you don’t control your life, if you don’t control your man, he will eventually destroy you.”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Daylight Marriage

“Sometimes people aren't nice,' I began. 'Then why are you always telling me to be nice?' Because someone has to break the cycle. Kindness can be contagious. And it has to start somewhere, right?”
― Heidi Pitlor, Impersonation

“I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’” “Yes,”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Furthermore, in a new study reported in the journal Science, subjects who read Alice Munro stories—specifically, the collection Too Much Happiness—demonstrated sharper social and psychological insight than those who did not.”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“after a luncheon party with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, Greta Garbo, and two producers—“I think it was a psychological test to see how I would act”—Knopf offered O’Brien work as MGM’s “European Scenario Editor.”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Anderson portrayed the city in Dark Laughter.”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“I think our hopes are made when we are young, and we can never adjust them to the real world.”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“We -- editors, writers, teachers, publishers -- need to do whatever we can to enliven readers, to help create communities for them if we want to continue to have readers at all. Our independent bookstores are the front lines, and many booksellers are fighting the good fight. Here, books stimulate conversation. Conversation stimulates a sense of community. Listening happens. Thinking. The exchange of thoughts.”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Best American Short Stories 2014

“Make it interesting and it will be true: this is what story writers live by.”
― Heidi Pitlor, 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become -- or are we already -- a nation of performers with no audience?”
― Heidi Pitlor, The Best American Short Stories 2014