Chris Offutt Quotes

Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within

I'd forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn't afford.

I don't miss my father, but without his shackles to strain against, the world is terrifying and vast. I have lost a kind of purpose, a reason to prove myself.

Still writing tales?" he said. I told him yes and he nodded once, returning his attention to the snake. Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer. I was merely doing what other men did - following in my father's footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk was the town drunk in two towns. Sons of soldiers joined the army. That I had become a writer was perfectly normal.

I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home.

Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on.

Most grandiose gestures are suspect - the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he's clean, then enters rehab. Building

MY FATHER was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast, fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic. Early in his sales career, a boss called him an "independent son of a bitch," which Dad took as the highest compliment he'd ever received. He wanted me to be the same way. Dad had no hobbies, no distractive activities. He didn't do household chores, wash the car,

When I couldn't see the land out there, I forgot I wasn't at home. Sometimes I wished it was always night.

The secret is to start a story near the ending.

The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom - names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation's imprint.

it occurred to him that time didn't move forward as he'd always thought. People move through time instead.

Time piles up like brush. You burn it in the fall and all you remember are the glowing cinders. I got ash heaps everywhere I look. -Old of the Moon

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed - the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger.