George V. Higgins Quotes

The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.

The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

The seductiveness of baseball is that almost everyone with an abiding interest in it knows exactly how it should be played. And secretly believes that he could do it, if only God had seen fit to make him just a little bit less clumsy.

The customary blizzard of pigeons wheeled briefly across the walk and settled back around an old lady who fed them from a large, wrinkled, paper bag. "I heard a guy on television the other night," Dillon said. "He was talking about pigeons. Called them flying rats. I thought that was pretty good. He had something in mind, going to feed them the Pill or something, make them extinct. Trouble is, he was serious, you know? There was a guy that got shit on and probably got shit on again and then he got mad. Ruined his suit or something, going to spend the rest of his life getting even with the pigeons because they wrecked a hundred-dollar suit. Now there isn't any percentage in that. There must be ten million pigeons in Boston alone, laying eggs every day, which will generally produce more pigeons, and all of them dropping tons of shit, rain or shine. And this guy in New York is going to, well, there just aren't going to be any of them in this world any more.

Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

You cannot write well without data.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

Life is hard but being stupid makes it harder.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners' certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O'Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.

Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round,

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings.

This life's hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.