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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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Charles Baxter
Telling
Pestering
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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.
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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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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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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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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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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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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.
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Literature is not an instruction manual.
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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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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
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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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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
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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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My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.
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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.
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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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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
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There is no weather in malls.
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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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