Robert Olen Butler > Quotes

“The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.”
― Robert Olen Butler

“there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn’t. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn’t.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.”
― Robert Olen Butler, Hell

“And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice.”
― Robert Olen Butler, Hell

“Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do that. But here’s a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.”
― Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness,”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist. 2”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, “It’s so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“And William says, "I lost one son utterly."... ..."So I've held my tongue. But the truth is you didn't go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn't even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, 'Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.”
― Robert Olen Butler, Perfume River

“If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.”
― Robert Olen Butler, They Whisper

“I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you’re less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it’s technique, you think about it. If it’s your socks, it’s not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that’s what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“What was the rest of my life to be? But I had no answers and I fought off the other question: what had all of my life been?”
― Robert Olen Butler

“the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by “understanding” it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“they were Muslims who had a long history not unlike Christian history—namely, marching into countries where a bunch of folks thought differently than you about life and God and you ground your righteous heel into their throats. I was an infidel. But not inside here. In this house—and on the most threadbare couch in the most desolate, rubble-strewn vacant lot—coffee and tobacco were the common sacraments of the whole human race.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“Mr. Cobb,” he said. And in just those two words his Boston Back Bay accent rolled over me as dramatically as if he were one of my mother’s leading men making an entrance, the “Mister” coasting on a schwa to a vanished “r”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“the man you watched die yesterday doesn’t exist today; he fell to yesterday’s bullets and you’ve got today’s bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Empire of Night

“Brilliantine-assaulted hair”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“Alcoholics bleed a lot. Because they hit their heads a lot.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Best Small Fictions 2015

“Which reminds me,” I said. “You got my pistol?” “Smith.” “And Wesson?” “Ben Smith.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“The man placed my mother on the counter. I’d selected an urn that could easily be confused for a Chinese vase, but I no longer appreciated that. When I saw it now I thought, This thing is so ugly, and if I screw off the top I will hear my mother scream.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Best Small Fictions 2015

“I’d been lucky never to have my nose rearranged. It was still on the straight and narrow,”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“Hatcher pops”
― Robert Olen Butler, Hell

“The Hòa Hào believes that the maintenance of our spirits is very simple, and the mystery of joy is simple, too. The four characters mean “A good scent from a strange mountain.”
― Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Marco’s hands are slender, quick and brutal. They are the hands of a man who shapes air. Together”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Best Small Fictions 2015

“The different pamphlets that lined the coffee table all had clouds on their covers. I shuffled them, then shuffled them again, but the weather wouldn’t change.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Best Small Fictions 2015

“vanilla and turf smells of old books.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“She bowed. A long, slow, stiff bow from the waist. The bow of a Prussian officer in a social setting with civilians, feeling uncomfortable, waiting to leave.”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“uninflected silence”
― Robert Olen Butler, The Star of Istanbul

“They are in the shapes of dragons and unicorns and stars and boats and horses and hares and toads. We light candles inside them and we swing them on sticks in the dark and the village is full of these wonderful pinwheels of light, the rushing of these bright shapes.”
― Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain