Tom Drury Quotes

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

I do get very involved in making a scene work without giving too much thought about how it affects the overall, which I think is hard to know in any case.

My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums ... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.

If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you.

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers.

I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.'

PIerre tried to work up a stormy heart of romantic loss about breaking up with Rebecca. It gave him license to drink and brood with hard eyes, which he found interesting.

After he got hammered one night at a high place about Lens Lake called the Grade, his parents found him standing in the kitchen.
"What if there was a language with only one word in it?" he asked.
"It would be easy to learn," said his mother.
"And with that word they would say everything every time they spoke," said Pierre.
"Yeah, that would be some language," said his father. "What are you on?"
"Just drinking," said Pierre. "Just good old American drinking.