Jincy Willett

“That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.”

“I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc's and Mac's. Nobody on God's earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute.”

“There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with a surprise inside.”

“We are so lonely here, with only our loved ones for company. We kill, maim, insult our loved ones, or dream of doing so, to keep from going mad. And then disaster strikes. God, how we love disaster.”

“When it comes to books, I am a sensuous woman.”

“Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)”

“(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.”

“All plots are cliche.”

“(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.”

“(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.”

“(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.”

“Arithmetic is the death of story.”

“...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.”

“Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.”

“According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.”

“Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs' living room and choked the Goldbergs' big brass ashtray with with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis.”

“So here is where I am so far, and this is all I know: the world is a big sardine can, and some of us are too agreeable for words. Most of us, really.”

“Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.”