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There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, Mistakes were made, you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter
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More quotes by Charles Baxter

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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
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There is no weather in malls.
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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.
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Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.
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If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.
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I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.
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I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.
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What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.
Charles Baxter
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
Charles Baxter