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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter
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More quotes by Charles Baxter

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Everybody should customize their names.
Charles Baxter
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
Charles Baxter
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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.
Charles Baxter
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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.
Charles Baxter
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What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.
Charles Baxter
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
Charles Baxter
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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.
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.
Charles Baxter
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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.
Charles Baxter
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Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Charles Baxter
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
Charles Baxter
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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.
Charles Baxter
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There is no weather in malls.
Charles Baxter
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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
Charles Baxter
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
Charles Baxter
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It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.
Charles Baxter
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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.
Charles Baxter
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
Charles Baxter
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When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.
Charles Baxter
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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
Charles Baxter