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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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Charles Baxter
Waiting
Instability
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Imaginative
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Spirits
Like
Using
Air
Somebody
Hear
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More quotes by 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.
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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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There is no weather in malls.
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
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Everybody should customize their names.
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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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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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.
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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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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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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
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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 blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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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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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