Big Pete > Big Pete's Quotes

“The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.”
― Harlan Ellison, Stalking the Nightmare

“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it. And there’s the work of Robert Stone and Joan Didion, who are both writers of conscience and painstaking workers of the sentence and paragraph. I don’t want to list names because lists are a form of cultural hysteria, but I have to mention Blood Meridian for its beauty and its honor. These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”
― Don DeLillo

“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

“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.”
― James Ellroy

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

“You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck.”
― Charles Portis, Gringos

“Any man who has got himself set over others and don't have any responsibility to something bigger than him is a son of a bitch.”
― Oakley Hall, Warlock

“I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb. Even if they know how, failing to regularly ingest the written word dooms them to ignorance, no matter what else they have or do”
― Edward Bunker, Education of a Felon

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You're afraid of smart women, aren't you?'
She had used this ploy before, having heard via the female bush telegraph that it was unanswerable. She was right though. I was leery of them. Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon. They were both amusing for a while but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.”
― Charles Portis, Gringos

“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“It was still only nine o'clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen. ”
― Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy

“Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.”
― Henry Lawson

“I was human, very human, and if in the days misspent
I have injured man or woman, it was done without intent.
If at times I blundered blindly — bitter heart and aching brow —
If I wrote a line unkindly — I am sorry for it now.”
― Henry Lawson

“[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

“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

“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“That period had been the peak of his life, though he had not realized it then. It had gone by without time for reflection, ending while he was still thinking things were going to get better.”
― Leonard Gardner, Fat City

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King