Jonathan Evison Quotes

Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.

I know I've lost my mind. But I'm not concerned, because it's the first thing I've lost in a long time that actually feels good.

Why not get a job in West Yellow Stone selling buffalo turds? I could make clocks out of them.

If I walk into a place, a party, say, and there's a bookshelf, I immediately gravitate toward it. Unless there's a bar. But even then, it's only a matter of a few rounds before I make my way to the bookshelf. If there are good books on it, I may never leave the spot all night. Anybody I really want to talk to is going to make his or her way to that bookshelf sooner or later, anyway, right? Books are a nexus. They start conversations, and they continue conversations, and they make people better conversationalists. I have not found this to be the case with Iron Chef, or even alcohol.

Some people change quicker than others. Sometimes people don't change at all, but their context changes, and just by being the same they change.

But you can see it, Harriet, a look in his eyes, an alertness, as if somewhere behind the disease, behind the scar tissue, behind the fog of disassociation, Bernard is all there, he's just lost his ability to communicate. Like somebody turned off his volume. You're certain he can see everything that is transpiring with crystal clarity, and he can't do a goddamn thing about it.

People really do change. Don't let anyone tell you differently. That the future does not conform to the past is not the exception, but the rule.

Friends," Andrew says, the candlelight hitting his braces just so. "It's true, we all rage. We all hate. We all fail. But . . ." And here, he raises a finger, pausing for dramatic effect, something he learned at his Toastmasters group. "That rage and contempt, that disappointment, that's what makes us yearn so hard. Those deficits, they make us reach, they stretch us. They make us fight back when it matters.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

I've been thinking about all the things I might have done differently. All the choices I didn't make. All the decisions that made and unmade me, all the actions and inactions I did or didn't take. With the shades drawn and the garbage overflowing, I've been thinking about all the bold steps I never took, all the gut instincts I didn't listen to, all the people I let down. I've been thinking about the cruel mathematics of my life, looking at my sums and wishing I'd shown my work.

For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

I never wanted to be anything but a writer, and I never let go of it.

When I started caregiving, I was not on very firm ground. My first marriage had dissolved. I was working at an ice-cream stand in my thirties. I learned that when you don't have anything to give, that's when you really give, and then you get back so much more.

It was quiet and smooth -a gazelle trapped in the body of a wart hog.

Forest is the backbone of the O-fers. He pitches, bats cleanup, collects the fees, makes all the pre game reminder calls, fills out the lineup card, and is the undisputed (though unspoken) team captain. Few things inspire like watching Forest round third in the late innings with a head full of steam and two bad knees, his spare tire heaving violently beneath his snug jersey, just as the second basemen is fielding the relay. "Run, Forest, run!" We yell, from the dugout. It never gets old.

A man's destiny is not in the eyes of others. It's in his own. And that, my young friend, is as good as any bank note.

Listen to me: everything you think you know, every relationship you've ever taken for granted, every plan or possibility you've ever hatched, every conceit or endeavor you've ever concocted, can be stripped from you in an instant. Sooner or later, it will happen. So prepare yourself. Be ready not to be ready. Be ready to be brought to your knees and beaten to dust. Because no stable foundation, no act of will, no force of cautious habit will save you from this fact: nothing is indestructible.

It's a cruel process, aging. Take my advice, dear, maintain your independence as long as possible.

My parents divorced after 25 years of marriage.

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war.

When it seemed at every turn that the winds of fate had blown our lives afoul, financially, emotionally, or idealistically. Look at all that we endured. Look at all we managed to light along our path through the long shadow of adversity. Look at the seemingly indestructible affiliation that was once us. And look at us now.

You have to smile, if you expect anybody to smile back.

Maybe a theme that touches all of my work is people reinventing themselves.

Wine is a much better salve than anything the medical profession has ever prescribed. Even the Bible condones it!

I grew up in the Bay Area until 1976, then I pretty much went all the way through primary and high school on Bainbridge, though like anybody who grows up on an island, I ran the first chance I got.

I love being a struggling artist; it makes me feel very alive.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

Homesteading is gone.

I've been thinking about the cruel mathematics of my life, looking at my sums & wishing I'd shown my work.

There are holes in our lives that can never be filled - not really, not ever.

I just need to believe that we're not in some form of stasis, that we can try to be whoever we want to be. We probably won't get there, but we might get a little bit closer, you know?

And I touched her with the strongest, most delicate touch in the world--like the thumb of God running down the spine of a baby bird.

He threw himself headlong at a job as if were he to stop the job would throw itself headlong back at him.

I write as a matter of need - seven books and God knows how many short stories before anyone published me.

We cleave our way through the mountains until the interstate dips into a wide basin brimming with blue sky, broken by dusty roads and rocky saddles strung out along the southern horizon. This is our first real glimpse of the famous big-sky country to come, and I couldn't care less. For all its grandeur, the landscape does not move me. And why should it? The sky may be big, it may be blue and limitless and full of promise, but it's also really far away. Really, it's just an illusion. I've been wasting my time. We've all been wasting our time. What good is all this grandeur if it's impermanent, what good all of this promise if it's only fleeting? Who wants to live in a world where suffering is the only thing that lasts, a place where every single thing that ever meant the world to you can be stripped away in an instant? And it will be stripped away, so don't fool yourself. If you're lucky, your life will erode slowly with the ruinous effects of time or recede like the glaciers that carved this land, and you will be left alone to sift through the detritus. If you are unlucky, your world will be snatched out from beneath you like a rug, and you'll be left with nowhere to stand and nothing to stand on. Either way, you're screwed. So why bother? Why grunt and sweat and weep your way through the myriad obstacles, why love, dream, care, when you're only inviting disaster? I'm done answering the call of whippoorwills, the call of smiling faces and fireplaces and cozy rooms. You won't

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves.

I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

I'm not in the business of meddling with people's destinies - and yes, my characters are real people to me. They have histories and thoughts and yearnings and hurts and misgivings and pleasures that don't belong to me.

Sometimes you lie, Forest. Sometimes its the right thing to do."
"I don't believe that, Ben."
"And why is that?"
"Because it always catches up with you."
"It doesn't, not always."
"It does."
"Bullshit."
"It's the truth, Ben."
"No, Forest, it's another kind of lie. If Lizzie draws you a picture of a catfish and it looks like a big hairy turd, what do you tell her? That it looks like shit? That you could draw a better fucking catfish with a crayon up your asshole? No, Forest, you tell her it's the most beautiful catfish you ever saw, don't you? Of course you do. Truth's a slippery slope sometimes.

This newfangled country is starting to grow on me, the adult despair of it all. Stuff I can relate to: lost loves, lost houses, lost dogs.

I'll never stop caring. But the thing about caring is, it's inconvenient. Sometimes you've got to give when it makes no sense to at all. Sometimes you've got to give until it hurts.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.

I remember us saying that we liked small houses, that proximity engendered closeness in a family. That nobody should be raised by a nanny or in day care. I remember us saying that time, not money, was the greatest resource. That everything would be all right. That the universe would provide. That belief was a force more powerful than gravity itself.

I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.