Pete Dexter > Quotes

“I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“In the beginning the stories were long and colored, but as he grew old and his eyes clouded, the stories were told in only a few words, and she came to understand that all the colors had fallen away from him, leaving only the moments. A woman who performed tricks in the air, an animal pulling a boat under water, dead children who spoke in bones. A man who loved bottles.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“Sometimes," he said, "you've got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Spooner noticed another, smaller Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin's ankle: Semper Fi Forever. Everywhere he went these days, Spponer witnessed America's crying need for more copy editors.”
― Pete Dexter, Spooner

“To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“I had noticed, even then, that there were certain women whom other women instinctively disliked, and that these women invariably had more bait in the water than the women who disliked them.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“He scart me," the girl said.

Miss Mary nodded and looked over at her in a slow, tired way. "That's your common sense talkin'," she said. "That man scare anybody got common sense.”
― Pete Dexter, Paris Trout

“...fill the holes with facts, not flowers.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“Not for the first time Spooner was reminded that marriage was not the straighforward assembly the instruction book led you to believe.”
― Pete Dexter

“A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.”
― Pete Dexter

“From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head’s all misshapen and pointy, and you say, “Son, you were born with talent.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“...without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept. Perhaps we all have our places.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“- Charley Utter & Wild Bill Hickock approach Deadwood…

… following the Whitewood Creek, & where things widened enough for a town sign, that was Deadwood.

“How's it look to you?” Bill said.

“Like something out of the Bible,” Charley said.

“What part of the Bible?” Bill said, when they were alone again.

“Where God got angry” Charley said.”
― Pete Dexter

“and low-life cable network producers, who have never had a thought in their heads that did not come from something else they saw on cable television, are so unthreatened by me that they feel safe stealing my stuff and claiming to have had sudden strokes of genius.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-storey trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job.”
― Pete Dexter, God's Pocket

“[He] did not understand women. It wasn't the way bartenders or comedians didn't understand women, it was the way poor people didn't understand the economy. You could stand outside the Girard Bank Building every day of your life and never guess anything about what went on in there. That's why, in their hearts, they'd always rather stick up a 7-Eleven.”
― Pete Dexter, God's Pocket

“He was a newspaperman,' he said, 'but there's some people who should never leave Savannah.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy

“He thought sometimes of leaving to look for Agnes Lake, but his thoughts of her were like dreams, and in his dreams Deadwood was where she was, and he was afraid he would lose her if he left.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“And the justice in this world is that you don’t have to break legs because somebody’s broken yours.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“now. “There is”
― Pete Dexter, Paris Trout

“When a writer tells you his novel has received mixed reviews, it means that after his book was trashed and his heart broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend critic at the Pekin Daily Times said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.”
― Pete Dexter, Spooner

“The boy shot Wild Bill's horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“He did not understand what went on in a Chinese heart, that something like this could happen. The Indians made more sense.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“My father drank half of what was in the glass and relaxed. “So what do you think?” “I don’t know,” I said. “About the business,” he said. “You’ve had a look, what do you think?” “I don’t think much one way or the other.” “It’s better than driving a truck.” I said, “It’s better than loading one.” And he looked at me and smiled. “We all have our own speed,” he said, meaning, I supposed, that Ward had never been expelled from the University of Florida. “One way or another, we do things when we’re ready.” He thought about something else for a moment, then looked at me and smiled again. A kind of peace had settled over him with the last bottle of wine. “Don’t be so serious about everything, Jack,” he said. “Your turn will come.” I said, “I do things when I have to,” and that made him laugh, and I laughed with him. I’d had a few glasses of wine myself. “Sometimes,” he said, fondly, as if he were remembering a story, “the only way you find out you’re ready is that when you have to be, you are.” I had another drink of the wine, and felt peaceful myself. “Can I tell you something?” I said. “Anything.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And that made him laugh too.”
― Pete Dexter, The Paperboy: A Novel

“She had to yell because the lawn mower had no muffler. “What in the world are you doing?” she said. The words fogged in the morning air, and now baby Spooner turned in her arms and was looking at him, smiling. The baby, only a couple of months old, already got him completely, understood everything that mattered. He looked from one of them to the other, and the expressions on their faces could have been bookends for the entire encyclopedia of human experience.”
― Pete Dexter, Spooner

“All in all, he felt more milked than loved.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood

“He looked at a story about a new gun they had out in California that spit seventy rounds in four seconds. They called it the "Peace Conservator." They were always doing some damn thing in California that nobody had thought out the consequences.”
― Pete Dexter, Deadwood