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At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

Charles Baxter

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Charles Baxter
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More quotes by Charles Baxter

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When blame has been assigned, the story is over.
Charles Baxter
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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
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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'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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Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.
Charles Baxter
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Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.
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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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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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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Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.
Charles Baxter
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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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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.
Charles Baxter
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Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.
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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[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
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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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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Literature is not an instruction manual.
Charles Baxter
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The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.
Charles Baxter