Jincy Willett Quotes

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliche. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. "Why didn't you say something?" they wanted to know, and she said, "I'm not a screamer." "Jesus," said one of them, "couldn't you have made an exception this one time?" "Apparently not," she said.

If something was worth writing down, it was worth writing down in full. And she had a horror of lists
grocery lists, Christmas card lists, and most grisly of all, to-do lists. Lists, like appointment books, were nails driven into the future. She knew this was an odd objection to be raised by a person whose daily life was utterly predictable, who never threw caution, or anything else, to the winds, who never packed light, because she never packed at all. Still, the future was a sleeping monster, not to be poked.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses - especially the older ones - functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

Only in art were there cliches; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.

Jenny Marzen made millions of dollars, as opposed to nickels, by writing novels that got seriously reviewed while selling big. Amy had skimmed her first one, a mildly clever thing about a philosophy professor who discovers her husband is cheating on her with one of her grad students, and who, while feigning ignorance of the affair, drives the girl mad with increasingly brutal critiques and research tasks, at one point banishing her to Beirut, first to learn fluent Arabic and then to read Avicenna's Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, housed in the American University. This was, Amy thought, a showoffy detail that hinted at Marzen's impressive erudition but was probably arrived at within five Googling minutes.

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking. (Jincy Willett)

Actually, the Sniper's sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carla's poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvy's critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, focused on that "youse" in the Sniper's counterfeit email. "Youse" was like a spectral elbow to Amy's ribs. Dangerous, malevolent people should not be amusing. In order to be humorous, you had to have perspective, to be able to stand outside yourself and your own needs and grudges and fears and see yourself for the puny ludicrous creature you really are. How could somebody do that and still imagine himself entitled to harry, to wound, to kill?

Ultimately, nobody is predictable, least of all to himself ... there wouldn't be any point in writing fiction otherwise.

All plots are cliche.

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college ... Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.

Arithmetic is the death of story.

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

Fiction, when it's done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone.

I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc's and Mac's. Nobody on God's earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute.

She pretended to find dust ruffles feminine and cozy, but really they were just flimsy barriers beyond which lurked the malign viscosity under her bed.

Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence.

With this book I hope what I always hope - that readers will nod their heads (not constantly, you know, but at the odd juncture) and think, "Yes, that's exactly right." This is why we write, and this is why we read. It's an act of communication, and if what you're communicating is true - if you haven't screwed it up (and there are so many ways to do that) - the response of your ideal reader isn't "Wow! What a fabulous sentence!" or "Wow! I did not know that!" It's "Yes. Exactly. I felt that too once, and I forgot it until now, and I thought I was the only one.

What was the value, really, of an alibi between lovers, friends, or family members? Idea for greeting card: 'Will You Be My Alibi?

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.

Carla was wearing a No Fear sweatshirt. You are too old, Amy wanted to tell her, for legible clothing.

Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs' living room and choked the Goldbergs' big brass ashtray with with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis.

...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was.

I love you," Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, "but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you"; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, "You son of a bitch.

Well, she had her own sorry self, her own story, the snowflake of her life, but even as a child she had been unimpressed by the breathless adult observation that no two of these were exactly alike. In the first place, she had thought, how does anybody know that? And in the second place, so what?