Kevin Wilson Quotes

Short stories, for me, it's like you step inside this brand new car and you drive it and you drive it into a tree and you walk away from it.

People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a super villain that he wasn't sure he could go through with it.

Buster closed his eyes, held his breath, and, before he realized that the gun had been fired, a gust of heat and wind passed over him and deconstructed the beer can atop his head, the sound of something irrevocably giving up its shape and becoming, in an instant, something new.

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.

I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.

He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.

Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.

When she called her brother, Buster said that she should climb out the window of the bathroom and run away, which was his solution to most problems.

If there were a button that would end the world, and that button were right in front of me, I would have smashed it so hard at that moment. I often thought about a button like that, and when I did, I always knew that I'd push it.

I don't know what I'm saying, really, but I guess it's like having a kid, though I don't have any kids. It's yours, you made it, and no matter what happens, you have that pride of ownership. You love it, even it it didn't amount to much.

Wyoming, to Annie, was represented by a blank, bleak space in her imagination. It was a place she could hide. The worst that could happen would be that she would sleep with Daniel and then get eaten by a wolf. She could live with that.

But do you enjoy it?" Annie asked. Raven stared at Annie's reflection in the mirror. "I don't hate it," Raven said. "You spend enough time with anything, that's all you can really ask for.

She could not smash anything without breaking herself.

I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting people. That's going to be a problem.

You are very sweet," she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, "but it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.

Again,' he said and, without waiting for an answer, ran into the growing dark without fear, every single part of his body overwhelmed with the task of being alive.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

They stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like falling snow.

Timothy's eyes kind of flashed with recognition, as if the seventeenth-century ghost who lived inside him had suddenly awakened.

...There were no measures that truly protected against disaster; you simply held on to what mattered and hoped that you found your way to the other side.

What do you think I'm going to do?" she asked him.
"Whatever it is," he answered, "I think you'll be terrified when it happens. Don't let that stop you.

She's got a way of making a man feel guilty for certain things he'd never feel bad about on his own, like watching someone shoot himself in the face.

The kids were happy. They had added another to their numbers. They didn't want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.

A lot of times when I think I'm being self-sufficient, I'm really just learning to live without the things that I need.

Up to this point, all I knew were beaten paths, tattooed with footprints, and I had come to the understanding that they were not much fun to travel because so many people were waiting for you at the end, wondering what took you so long.

I knew that whatever I chose would be the wrong thing. I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I'd keep doing the wrong thing.

My parents were distrustful of the outside world. They didn't think much good came out of it ... The outside world was this strange place that was not so much dangerous as not as interesting as what went on in the house.

Anytime in my life when I see an accumulation of items, a title of ownership in my name, I feel my insides swell. What am I going to do with all of this? Where am I going to put it? So I get rid of it. And I feel calm again. I am a library patron, a renter without an option to buy, a Salvation Arm donator, a spring cleaner of the highest order.
Why then, why in the world, do I work here, surrounded by all of this? It's easy enough. This is art, and it is not mine. I am only looking after it while the real owners are away. Most of all, I suppose, although I may not want things, I don't mind touching them for a while.

The simplest things are the hardest to understand.

Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.

I have a kind of unhealthy obsession with movies.

If I can't find something on this plate to eat, that's my fault," she replied.

I grew up not reading fiction; I watched movies and read comic books, and one of the ways I taught myself to think about narrative was through film.

On the opening night of the Hazzard County High School production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Buster was going to play Romeo. His sister, Annie, was to play Juliet. Other than Buster, no one backstage seemed to understand that this was a problem. "Let me ask you something, Buster," said Mr. Delano, the high school drama teacher. "Have you heard of the phrase the show must go on?" Buster nodded. "Well," Mr. Delano continued, "this is the kind of moment for which that phrase was coined.

Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones.

Don't you see? The things we once loved do not change, only our belief in them ... You are left with the only things that any of us have in the end. The things we keep inside of ourselves, that grow out of us, that tell us who we are.

[S]he found it impossible to move, the weight of her failure keeping her anchored to the sofa.

It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.

Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it's hard to summon it when you really need it.

With each deep, measured breath, she imagined that various parts of her body were slowly going numb, from her fingers to her hand to her wrist to her elbow to her shoulder, until she was as close to dead as she could be. It was an old Fang family technique employed before doing something disastrous. You pretended to be dead and when you came out of it, nothing, no matter how dire, seemed important.

Because I kept fucking up, because it seemed so hard to not fuck up, I lived a life where I had less than what I desired. So instead of wanting more, sometimes I just made myself want even less. Sometimes I made myself believe that I wanted nothing.

The toxicity of love coupled with pain can erode even the strongest heart.

...feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed.

If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.

It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.

Buster was not used to this experience, physical desire that was actually fulfilled. In his entire life, he had kissed five women. One of them had been his sister. This was, Buster understood, a terrible percentage. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets.

Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them too.

I know why you picked that movie,' he told her. Annie smiled and said, 'It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.' Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. 'It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it's possible to bring them back from the dead.' Annie shook her head. 'I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

He felt certain that he was a failure, every artistic endeavor ending with his own surprise at how little had come from it. Perhaps that was how life worked, the expectation of success after each failure the engine that kept the world turning. Perhaps retrogression was an artistic endeavor in itself. Perhaps he might sink so far that he would find himself, somehow, returned to the surface.

Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip 'N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk.

Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn't my life anymore. It was someone else's. And I had decided that I'd just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.

She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.