Nic > Nic's Quotes

“I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.”
― T.C. Boyle

“To readers who tend to think primarily in terms of liking or disliking characters: these people are fictional. They do not stand before us asking to be liked. They stand before us asking to be read. They ask to be seen and heard and maybe even understood, or at least for their motives to be understood, if that is what the author is after. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend these characters are in fact real, that they are human beings standing before us. Let us open up at least a little to those we might not like—in their presence, we might experience something new. To me, facing those we might not want to face is crucial to living in a diverse world.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Best American Short Stories 2015

“The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.”
― Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight

“Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Rifles

“Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities”
― William T. Vollmann, Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater

“My mistakes are my life.”
― Samuel Beckett

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz