Quote

Literature is not an instruction manual.

Charles Baxter

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Baxter
Manual
Manuals
Instruction
Literature

More quotes by Charles Baxter

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
Charles Baxter
Image
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
Image
At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
Charles Baxter
Image
[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
Charles Baxter
Image
Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
Charles Baxter
Image
Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
Charles Baxter
Image
Everybody should customize their names.
Charles Baxter
Image
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
Image
What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.
Charles Baxter
Image
There is no weather in malls.
Charles Baxter
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
Charles Baxter
Image
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.
Charles Baxter
Image
Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
Charles Baxter
Image
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter