Ron Carlson Quotes

I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.

If we're really writing, we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate.

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.

It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science.

I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge.

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.

I'm a Midwesterner.

The men and women, the weapons, the deerhunt all make a huge and fragile danger in John Bolger's novel The Hunters. There is care and harm in this book and all written with felicitous and steady grace.

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

Get down, get naked, get savage.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.

My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.

In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!

I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi ... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.

Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon.

Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing - inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher.

I tell students, when in doubt, to title their story after the smallest concrete object in their story. I warn them off plays on words, ('The Rent Also Rises'
no; 'Life in My Cat House'
no) and no grand reaches, either. 'Reverence,' 'Respect,' 'Regret,' 'Greed,' 'Adventure,' 'Retribution.' And never use the worst title of all time, 'The Gift,' a story I read six times a year.