Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

Jimmy's eyes would turn as red and sticky as candy, and his head would fall back against the seat in a dream. If he were lucky tonight, maybe he would see something that he hadn't seen before. And then it would be my turn. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Nobody really turns out too happy in any of my stuff. It's really strange, because I'm actually a pretty happy person. I'm not walking around giggling or anything like that, but I've got this feeling that everything is okay with my life. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

If the story wasn't overly long, I'd type it out. And I'd carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I'd throw it away and do another one. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

You can't be a pussy all your life Todd. Someday you're just gonna have to say fuck it. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I took a correspondence course with a guy at Ohio University. He gave me ten exercises, and one of them resulted in the story "Bactine." It pleased me a lot more than anything else I'd ever done, so I kept messing around and by the time I got to Ohio State I'd written maybe eight stories. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

He imagined the door to a sad, empty room closing with a faint click, never to be opened again, and that calmed him a little. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

It's hard to live a good life ... It seems like the Devil don't ever let up. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I'm not sure about 'absolute' happiness, but I am happiest when I go to bed at night knowing that I tried to do my best that day. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Look, girls don't care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

When I started graduate school we did this publishing class where we learned about submitting and read interviews with editors from different magazines. A lot of them said they got so many submissions that unless the first page stuck out or the first paragraph or even the first sentence they'll probably send it back. So part of my idea was that if I have a really good first sentence maybe they'll read on a bit further. At least half, maybe more of the stories in Knockemstiff started with the first sentence; I got it down then went from there. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

They's a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there."
Arvin asks, "More than a hundred?"
Willard laughed a little and put the truck in gear. "Yeah, at least that many. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Don't get me wrong: I think that everyone should put forth an effort to do better, but let's face it, some of us are just plain luckier than others. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

The Oxys filled holes in me I hadn't realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I don't think my book is any more shocking than if I went out right now and brought back your local newspaper and found a story that happened around here yesterday or the day before that's just as shocking as anything in my book. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

When you first heard him talking about it, you'd figure he was batshit crazy, but really, he was just trying to fill up his days so he didn't have to think about what a fucking mess he had made of everything. It's the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we'll ever do. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

The way I saw the characters these things just happened naturally. At the same time - and I know it's probably not apparent when you read the book - but I really tried to hold back because I didn't want it to become a cartoon. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I had this bad habit of not writing out a first draft and going back. For me it was the first sentence, then the second sentence, and I might be several weeks on the first page instead of writing a draft and trying to figure it out from there. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that, I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

J.R. Angelella is a truly gifted writer. Zombie is one of the smartest, strangest, and most beautifully crafted coming-of-age stories you will ever encounter. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I worked in a paper mill all my adult life and there were a lot of funny guys there. So you pick up on that. Even though something really bad might have happened to somebody you can still make a joke out of it. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

A damp, gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin of a corpse. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don't listen to music while I'm writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I'm revising. ~ Donald Ray Pollock

Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields. ~ Carol S. Dweck

You people do not have to live like this!" the man pleaded. "We are humans, made in the image of God. No machine has the right to order us around." The man reached inside his box, no bigger than a foot square, and took out a small black book. "Here is the truth. Read it!"
Before anyone could act, one of the Sentries aimed its red eye at the babbling man, and shot out a deadly energy ray. With a final shout of defiance, the man fell to the ground, dead. The contents of his container spilling out onto the spaceport's floor. Marcellus looked down at the items, so precious to the man: they were copies of The Koran and The Bible. ~ Donald Allen Kirch

I'd hate to compare anyone with Sugar Ray Robinson, but Donald is the closest thing to Robinson I've ever seen ~ Dave Gorman

Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett. ~ Donald Fagen

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, "There is always a day of reckoning." The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits - ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human's life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting. ~ Donald Van De Mark

What are we?" he asked. "Why, we are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Creation turns in its abyss. We have bothered it, dreaming ourselves to shapes. The void is filled with slumbers; ten billion on a billion on a billion bombardments of light and material that know not themselves, that sleep moving and move but finally to make an eye and waken on themselves. Among so much that is flight and ignorance, we are the blind force that gropes like Lazarus from a billion-light-year tomb. We summon ourselves. We say, O Lazarus Life Force, truly come ye forth. So the Universe, a motion of deaths, fumbles to reach across Time to feel its own flesh and know it to be ours. We touch both ways and find each other miraculous because we are One. ~ Ray Bradbury

Stop terrorizing the servants, Channing. I don't care how you get yourself out of this twitchy, angry mood you are in, but do it now. I believe I preferred you as a cold, elusive pollock."

Channing grinned. "Now you see why I work so hard for that state. Anything else is worse."

Biffy rolled his eyes. "You could try being happy. Or would that strain something?"

"He doesn't know how." Lyall's voice was sad.

Biffy glared at them both. "Oh, for goodness' sake, he's a werewolf, and he likes to fight. Is it so wrong to suggest he might, oh I don't know, fight for her? ~ Gail Carriger

A lot of people want to keep country music in the minority of people. But it belongs to the world. It's art. ~ Ray Price

If you don't tell people about your success, they probably won't know about it. ~ Donald Trump

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. ~ Ray Bradbury

At 78 years old, I am not surprised at much anymore. Germany has taken divergent positions before, so has France, so has England, so has the US. ~ Donald Rumsfeld

If you think God looks only one way or sounds only one way or is only one way, you're going to look right past Me night and day. You'll spend your whole life looking for God and not finding Her. Because you're looking for a Him. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

My dad has always been a big Ray Charles fan, and I've grown up listening to all kinds of music. ~ Avicii

In the Negro Leagues, we'd play three games a day on the weekends. Then we'd ride the bus and travel to play the next day someplace else. You'd hang your shirt out the bus window to dry. ~ Ray Dandridge

Designers know too much about their product to be objective judges: the features they have come to love and prefer may not be understood or preferred by the future customers. ~ Donald A. Norman

Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park having dinner with Ellen Barkin and Ron Perelman ... Right now, I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you up for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep ... I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta ... And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, "Who I Love" is every last one. I am every last one. People ask of me: Where are you? Where are you? ... Verily I ask of you to ask yourself: Where are you? Where are you? ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis

That poem you like, how does it end?"
He knows how it ends. He's looked it up by now, that's why he asks.
But I answer him anyway.
"'We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed
with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.'"
Eliot shakes his head. "It does not need the last three words. The last
three words are wrong."
I laugh at his correcting a Nobel prize-winning poet, but I agree. I
know what drowning feels like. It doesn't need water. And human voices,
if they say the right things, can save you.
"Eliot, do you have a pen I can borrow?"
I can feel him smiling in the dark, and we watch the sea caress the
sand.
"That man in the poem, Mr. Prufrock, he was a coward, wasn't he?"
Eliot says.
My answer to his question is the same as his answer to mine. ~ Ray Cluley

Later in the morning Saul tried to die. ~ Ray Bradbury

One's spirituality is about one's deepest personal understanding of and interactions with Life and God ... whatever those may be. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Each truth we find (in life) leads us a step closer to God. ~ Donald L. Hicks

We're missing one vital ingredient to brew the reversal potion." A chill went down her spine on icy spider feet. "Don't tell me it's Donald Trump's toupee." "I ~ Nadine Mutas

Deep down, nature is inherently peaceful, calm and beautiful. The universe as a whole is perfect. The chaos is on the surface. ~ Amit Ray

There are kind of four people up at the top, [Donald] Trump,[Marco] Rubio,[Ted] Cruz,[Ben] Carson, and then there's me and about three governors. I'm perfectly happy with that position right now, honestly, because when I started this race, I was 17 out of 16. The pollsters didn't even ask my name, because so few people knew me. ~ Carly Fiorina

Fix the image before it fades. ~ Ray Bradbury

AI winters were not due to imagination traps, but due to lack of imaginations. Imaginations bring order out of chaos. Deep learning with deep imagination is the road map to AI springs and AI autumns. ~ Amit Ray

We know that Donald Trump loves S.C.A.P.E.G.O.A.T.S. Now he has stooped to new lows - Separating Children And Parents Entering Gateways Of America Truly Sucks ! ~ Alex Morritt

Thanks to Hillary Clinton, Iran is now the dominant Islamic power in the Middle East, and on the road to nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton's support for violent regime change in Syria has thrown the country into one of the bloodiest civil wars anyone has ever seen - while giving ISIS a launching pad for terrorism against the West. ~ Donald Trump

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius nov ~ Grant Morrison

Somewhere along the way you will have to learn to just Trust Life. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence. ~ Donald O. Clifton

This guy [Donald Trump] has not offered a single serious policy proposal, which is important if you want to be president of the United States.And Hillary Clinton is going to have clear shot to the Oval Office. And so I think there are many out there that are rooting for that outcome, so that he's the nominee. And you can see it in the coverage he's gotten. ~ Marco Rubio

Hey! Don't laugh at me for that cupcake thing. I enjoy cupcakes, therefore EVERYONE should enjoy cupcakes. ~ Ray Toro

And for yourself, whatever there has been either of sin or duty, remember the one and forget the other, and betake yourself wholly to the mercy of God and the merit of Christ. ~ Donald Cargill

Musically, he was like an old man in a boy's skin. ~ Eric Clapton

The Koch brothers tend to give to right-leaning and libertarian causes. Koch money was instrumental, for example, in founding the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party. ~ Donald Luskin

Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from him horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull. ~ Ray Bradbury

It is a tough business but if you get yourself in a situation like I, you can maintain a career over many years. That, to me, is a successful actor. ~ Ray Stevenson

Life is bendable to our will more than we know. In fact, that's the deal. If we don't know that life bends to our will, it will not. So the trick is to know that life is on our side
and but awaits our command. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

The leading non-establishment Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, is just sailing past [establishment Republican candidates] in the polls. He is still surging. He is basically killing them all. ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish. ~ John Ray

Open, fact-based sex education is among the biggest threats to religion. Knowing the facts about sex reveals the myths that religions preach. ~ Darrel Ray

I stand before you as the governor of Texas but also stand before you the son of two tenant farmers. Ray Perry who came home after 35 bombing missions over Europe to work his little corner of land out there and Amelia who made sure that my sister Milla and I had everything that we needed, included hand sewing my clothes until I went off to college. ~ Rick Perry

Memory is an illusion, nothing more. It is a fire that needs constant tending. ~ Ray Bradbury

Because the Muse persists. ~ Ray Bradbury

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious. ~ Ray Bradbury

Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful. ~ Amit Ray

In life you have to rely on the past, and that's called history. ~ Donald Trump