Carolyn See Quotes

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

You don't want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life.

It's my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It's like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

What is 'cool,' anyway? Maybe it's Warne Marsh, almost totally obscure and penniless, coming in late to a fourth-rate Hollywood nightclub, playing like an angel with a couple of sidemen, but never speaking to or even acknowledging another human being.

I don't believe you can buy or sell 'cool.'

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

If you are in any way squeamish or genteel, skip 'Gillespie and I.' If you'd like to know a little more about the seamy side of the human condition, by all means, pick this one up.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory
and shame and shabbiness
of what it is to be human.

I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.

There's a saying that when you go on traveling tours, you get to know whom the designated jerk is going to be within three days, and if you don't know it by then, you're the jerk.

Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.

I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.

Very much as men project weird fantasies on women, the people in New York project weird fantasies on California.

Yes, I do think the ruling class in America would like to grab everything for themselves, because they were brought up that way, and early American Puritans somehow had it wired into their religion that poverty is a sign that God doesn't like you, that you're not "saved," that money, on the other hand, is a sign of God's approval. They say the middle class in this country is shrinking, but I don't really know who the "they" is in that sentence. I tend to think there's a natural process of balances -- that when the very rich press their luck too far, there's a danger of a backlash, and the rich know it. There's often a time when the bully on the playground does one bad thing too many and all the little weaklings gang up on him, and that's the end of that particular pattern. I look at that stuff as a novelist, and as a human being, but I try not to get too worked up about it. I think of myself as wearing the invisible tee shirt with "You can kill me but you can't impress me" printed on it. Every second I spend laughing is a second I don't have to think about Vice President Cheney, for instance.

Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

Everyone in the world should read this book... We should read it to learn about the world and what it means to be human.

Reality is when you pay the rent. Get caught in traffic or your car breaks down. Really it's an AM/FM sort of thing. You've got reality and then there's the miraculous and the transcendent. And once you start, time stops.

'Gillespie and I' is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.

Wake up! Keep waking up! Wake up more and more often!