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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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Charles Baxter
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More quotes by Charles Baxter

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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 a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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There is no weather in malls.
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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.
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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.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
Charles Baxter
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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Everybody should customize their names.
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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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
Charles Baxter