Daniel Woodrell Quotes

Tip began to nod, then shook his head. I could be eight kinds of crooked, there, piglet, but I ain't never been no kind of dumb.

I have tried to outline, but all that seems to guarantee is that the book will not much resemble the outline, so I long ago stopped. I never really know where a book is going, and each new book has it's own voice - and I have to be available to hear it. That's what can be frustrating between novels - the way I wrote any previous book won't work with this one. I'll make notes, do little sketches of characters or places, but every new book has to be discovered, and maps to the older books won't help much.

I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.

You know, I'm very near to bein' normal, but I just can't get over the hump.

Sammy, wouldn't you like to add up to something? In the future? Amount to something?"
"Naw. I just figure to roll on, stackin' days, you know, till the day I fuck up big enough the future gets canceled. Or else all planned out for me, maybe. There's a somewhat likely chance of that."
"Man, Sammy, I can't live thinking that way"
"Well,I don't think about it.

Mike Rondeau, a tall drink of a man sloshed into a squat glass, with a belt that could double as a lasso and a volume of ambitious lies that he called his life, came in the door and laughed.

As the frosty bits dwindled the wind slowed and big snowflakes began falling as serenely as anything could fall the distance from the sky. Ree listened to lapping shores while snowflakes gathered on her. She sat unmoving and let snow etch her outline in deepening clean whiteness. The valley seemed in twilight though it was not yet noon. The three houses across the creek put on white shawls and burning lights squinted golden from the windows. Meat still hung from limbs in the side yards, and snow began clinging to the limbs and meat. Ocean waves kept sighing to shore while snow built everywhere she could see.

Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

Oys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits, Shocking us would have required some kind of genius.
Woe To Live On

I think there are some folks who don't particularly like what I have to say, but on the whole, the reaction has been very positive.

I ain't shit! I ain't shit! shouts your brain, and this place proves the point.

The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

I joined the Marines the week I turned 17, and that led to a few experiences that might qualify as adventure - eye of the beholder.

I think one of our cardinal fuckups is how we insist that even vicious whimsical crazy shit needs to make sense, add up, belong to a reason. We lay this pain on ourselves
there must be a reason behind this horror, there must, but I ain't adequate to findin' it, and that's my fault, so torture me some more.

He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles.

Babies don't know anything but nipples and lullabies. they splash out looks of wonder on anybody whether they merit it or not.

This new spot for life might be but a short journey as a winged creature covers it, that is often said, but, oh, Lord, as you know, I had not the wings, and it is a hot, hard ride by road.

Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

The boys crept to her side at early dark to sit around her, mournful, with their heads bowed down like they wished they knew how to pray the oldest prayers and pray her well. Harold held a cool cloth to her swollen eye. Sonny made fists and said, 'What was the fight about?' 'Me bein' me I guess.' 'How many was it?' 'A few.' 'Tell us the names. For when we grow up.

You see the insides of a classier world like that and it sets your own to spinning off-balance, and a tireless gnawing discontent gets to snacking on your guts and spirit. This caliber of a place makes you want to discriminate against yourself, basically, as it reveals you as such a loser. A tiny mote of nothin' much just here to muss up the planet these worthies lived so grandly on and wished they could keep clean of you and yours. I ain't shit! I ain't shit! shouts your brain, and this place proves the point. Oh,

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.

Can't none of this be new to you.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss.

Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.

Ice slipped from everything, limb, twig, stump, rock, and cascaded chinking to ground. Mist lifted from the bottoms to lie over the tracks but did not lift much above her head. Mist smeared like tears squashed on her cheeks.

I said shut up once already, with my mouth.

The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup.

You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.

Wanda Bone Bouvier had that thing that makes a hound leap against its cage. It ws a quality that was partly a bonus from nature and partly learned from cheesecake calendars and Tanya Tucker albums.

I felt like a number of things in me as a writer just clicked.

Her right hand held a bottle of Pepsi that she'd clogged with peanuts and called a late lunch.

In February of 1972, a snowstorm blew into Kansas City, and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike.

I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.

I remember all the writers I started with who I was embarrassed to be around - they were so much better than me. A lot of them are no longer writing. I guess they were better rounded and had other options. Due to social discomfort, I only had the one road.

I'd just lie around all day. It's the chemo, the poison they pump into you. Sometimes I'd be walking across the room and think, 'There it is; I got to rest.' And I had to, right then.

Of the ready green on a blue felt top. The gentlemen who had assembled around it for an evening of high-stakes Hold 'Em were well dressed, well fed, and well heeled, but now their mouths hung loose and their poolside tans paled. "Hands on the table, guys," Jadick said. "And don't any of you act one-armed." A short man with an air of compact power, Jadick moved with brisk precision and spoke calmly. He pulled back the hammers on his archaic but awesome weapon and said, "Scoop the fuckin' manna, boys." "Check," said Dean Pugh. He and Cecil Byrne, his fellow Wingman, went slowly around the table

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

This happens to me all the time: I think I'm working on one thing, but this other thing, whether I want it to or not, keeps coming through.

Shade said as he stepped down the hall, "is another of the 'eternal boy's' major concerns, if you can believe it." The officer sat down and swung his feet to the desktop. "I probably could," he said, "but I think I'll pass." Blanchette leaned on Shade's arm, a pantomime of crumbling health, and swatted at his

My father was a salesman, and I always said I wouldn't be one.

Fair?' Bev said. 'Poor baby. Look, you're really sayin' that the ways of life are glum and grim and nasty, and I guess you want to turn crybaby about that, but what's on my mind is, Whoever misled you things were otherwise, hon? What sugar factory spun you out with such silly candy-assed notions? For cryin' out loud. There's other staples I'll break to you right now, too: The sun gives life but you'd be an ash flake if you got too close to it, you got to swallow water to live but sometimes it kills you, Uncle Sam don't truly count you as any relation, and God has gone blank on your name and face.

I'm not from the movie world. I'm from the book world.

I've bumped into at least three people in town who all insist 'Winter's Bone' is about them.

On his next return to this world, Duncan Cobb, oldest son, faithless cousin, cautious lover, and pal of killers, awoke infused with the lucidity born of no escape, and a mortal dose of honesty.

It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.

I hate to fall back on weird to describe them, but goofy is too weak, and strange sounds too sensible.

She would never cry where her tears might be seen and counted against her.

I stood on the cedar deck for quite a spell, eye fuckin' the night sky, trying to stare down the stars. Blood had crusted on my neck, back, in my hair, down the legs of my jeans, to where i was as spattered as a thumbless beef packer. I kept on with my close study of the higher reaches, fantasizing that a comet was due to streak by trailing a message only for me, spelled out clearly and printed huge. Some epigram from far away out there that'd clue me in on how to feel after killing a man

I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.

I don't want to be callous about it, but we all seemed to get over the Oklahoma bombing pretty quickly, and we're never going to get over 9/11.

It's called 'The Outlaw Album,' not 'The Ozarks Album.' These are stories that delve into different kinds of outlawry, from criminal acts to interior, or psychological, outlawry. The book is not meant to be a tapestry of the Ozarks.

I was thinking of my father's family. I can find their graves, but not that much about them. They didn't do anything notable enough to be in the records of newspapers.

I'd met some awfully tough gals in my life, and I find them compelling, if I don't have to socialize with them too much.

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

It was at this moment, chided by his old and present rival, that Shade decided it was time to revert to the shitkicker verities. Brazen dash, rough talk, and an ounce or two of mean were clearly required.

The pain was shrill enough, but the idea of a finger of mine twitching about, lost in chicken-pecked dust, was more terrible.

The going sun chucked a vast spread of red behind the ridgeline. A horizon of red light parsed into shafts by standing trees to throw pink in streaks across the valley snow.

I came back when I'd had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks.

Grunt work is my main calling, but I like to be dead when I do it.

I said, "There's ditches his size, too.

I have a Ford Taurus, and I don't care who knows it.

The bodies draped down through the leaves like rancid baubles in the locks of a horrible harlot.

It was in a grim room on Eddy Street that I finally opened 'A Moveable Feast.' I read it all overnight. I read it again the next day.

She took him to places inside a shaded room that he'd only dimly imagined might exist, and while there in sweaty reality he reclined like a pasha of lust, a man lost to squirts, sighs, fresh angles of entry and the enveloping stink, and to find this carnal enchantment for the first time at his age was to welcome a streaking of madness into his life - madness he prayed had no end now that it had begun.

There are people so alienated from the mainstream of American culture that it's like a parallel universe. They don't expect anything but trouble from the square world. Every time they interact with that world, they're given a ticket, sent to jail, drafted. It's never good. So they live by a separate value system.

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns.

A person has to show some spirit
fate just about never shines kindly on chickenshits.

That water's colder'n hell!"
That's what makes it good. That's what makes it help all your bruises'n bumps'n stuff."
It's colder'n a goddam witch's tit in there!

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I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

If I weren't so lazy, I would have 14 books, not eight.

For a long time, I didn't think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

You realize you're alive while you're alive, and you better notice it then, because later, it's hard to see.

Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.

I realized there might be monetary or financial reasons to jump in and write a 'Winter's Bone Retriumphs' or something, and nobody would object to me doing that in publishing. But it would be a waste of my time, and they always take a little longer than you thought they would take.

Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

I slept for over a full day, as you know, but I won't say I rested.

I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.

As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.

The town of St. Charles near St. Louis was founded by a trapper named Blanchette. There is a section that's called Frenchtown on historical markers.

Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

I got my face close up to the man still standing. I let him understand that there was oodles of danger in me; my head wobbled loose, three ticks off center. This scary face is all them such as me has to show this other world, the world in charge of our world, that musters any authority, gets any reluctant respect at all. If us lower elements didn't show our teeth plenty and act fast to bite, we'd just be soft, loamy dirt anybody could walk on, anytime, and you know they would, too, since even with a show of teeth there's a grassless path worn clear across our brains and backs.

The first time Ree kissed a man it was not a man, but Gail acting as a man, and as the kissing progressed and Gail acting as a man pushed her backwards onto a blanket of pine needles in shade and slipped her tongue deep into Ree's mouth, Ree found herself sucking on the wiggling tongue of a man in her mind, sucking that plunging tongue of the man in her mind until she tasted morning coffee and cigars and spit leaked from between her lips and down her chin. She opened her eyes then and smiled, and Gail yet acting the man roughed up her breasts with grabs and pinches, kissed her neck, murmuring and Ree said, "Just like that! I want it to be just like that!" There came three seasons of giggling and practice, puckering readily anytime they were alone, each being the man and the woman, each on top and bottom, pushing for it with grunts or receiving it with signs. The first time Ree kissed a boy who was not a girl his lips were soft and timid on hers, dry and unmoving, until finally she had to say it and did, "Tongue, honey, tongue," and the boy she called honey turned away saying, "Yuck!

The great name of the Dollys was Milton, and ... if you named a son Milton it was a decision that attempted to chart the life he'd live before he even stepped into it, for among Dollys the name carried expectations and history ... Jessops, Arthurs, Haslams and Miltons were born to walk only the beaten Dolly path to the shadowed place, live and die in keeping with those blood-line customs fiercest held.
Ree and Mom both had shouted and shouted and shouted against Harold becomeing a Milton, since Sonny was already a Jessop ... Ree'd a thousand times wished she'd fought longer for sonny, Shouted him into an Adam or Leotis or Eugene, shouted until he was named to expect choices.

YOU'RE NO ANGEL, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it's been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you're fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin' down with a miserable bluesy beat and there's two girls millin' about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it's three or four Sunday mornin' and you ain't slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain't had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they'd taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, 'cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin' to waste since an article in The Scroll said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation.

That's how it happens.

How Things Happen Opening

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

I had bill collectors chasing me. We were skipping from town to town, not leaving forwarding addresses. The agent couldn't find me when he sold my book. He finally found me.

Nobody cares for getting belittled by a person you've had sex with. A person you've licked all over. Nobody wants to sit there and get run down too far by somebody who gives them a hard-on.

As the ample Hedda, who disguised her ampleness behind a billow of yellow summer dress, told it, her life up 'til she hoisted this very bloody mary in her hand was a convoluted tale of bubbly love gone flat, fine talents unnoticed and similarly woeful bullshit.

I rise near dawn, make a strong cup of coffee, wander to my desk and come fully awake by reading something written the day before.

I can't say that dropping out of school at 16 to join the Marines was my best idea. On the other hand, maybe it was. Who knows?

MOTHER NATURE was laying down some Law out there in the bayou night, and as befits the order of things, large feathered creatures dove off high branches, swooped low and stuck talons in smaller furry meals, and bandit-eyed coons came stealthily out of hollow logs and glommed finned, scaly chow from the still, brackish shallows, while all those things that slither waited, coiled, for the passing appearance of any prey absentminded, and where the bayou waters butted against land and a screened porch overlooked the boggy stage for these food-chain theatricals, Emil Jadick sat on the arm of the couch and wrapped up a lecture that had been real Type A in tone and content. He said, And if either of you fucks up because you ain't been listenin' to me, I'll take you off the calendar myself, understood?

I had gone to enlist in the Navy, but they had a long waiting list and no need for high-school dropouts.

The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family
that's the always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That's a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them.