Tracy Daugherty > Quotes

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”
― Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

“Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered" 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts.”
― Tracy Daugherty

“Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult,” he said, “but because it wishes to be art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

“Working on novels, he reaffirmed his belief that nothing important could really be explained; it could only be experienced in the daily clutter of stuff that fiction was so good at cataloguing. [re: Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“[W]hat an artist does is fail,” he writes. “The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition . . . there is no such thing as a ‘successful artist.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

“The novel offers no startling revelations about how to cope with grief or sadness or aging. It offers what a novel can, a rich, full experience of an individual mind. [re: Larry McMurtry, Duane's Depressed]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“apocalyptic notions,” she once said, thinking of earthquakes, floods, and fires. “However, mixed up with this tolerance for notions in which the world is going to end dramatically is the belief that the world can’t help but get better and better. It’s really hard for me to believe that everything doesn’t improve, because thinking like that was just so much part of being in California.” More deeply, the paradoxes in her writing suggest her real interest is language, its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites, and the ways stories, particularly stories that tell us how to live, get told or don’t. For”
― Tracy Daugherty, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

“In interviews, McMurtry frequently mentioned that whenever he wrote a novel now, he paused to consider which young bankable actors could play his characters in a movie, and if he could think of none, he would change his characters to fit Hollywood's realities. Such comments sounded like further attempts to disabuse his readers from clinging to nostalgic notions of the Novel as High Art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“None of it [art] tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already know but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did." [Bill Wittliff about Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“I loved idiot paintings, tops of doors, decors, saltimbanques, canvases, signboards, popular engravings, obsolete literature, church Latin, badly-spelled pornographic works, novels by our grandmothers, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, folk refrains, popular rhythms. —Rimbaud, “A Season in Hell”
― Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme

“But I had ceased to be that person; I acted him or impersonated him as best I could, for the benefit of loved ones." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“our emotional experience remains largely unexplored, and therein lie the dramas, poems, and novels." [Larry McMurtry]”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life