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I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

Jess Walter

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Jess Walter
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: July 20
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Spokane
Washington
Easier
Path
Publishers
Bigs
Published
Stories
Obviously
Become
Especially
Book
Writer
Think
Becoming
Thinking
Novel

More quotes by Jess Walter

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I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.
Jess Walter
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The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.
Jess Walter
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I don't know a family that isn't touched by some sort of addiction.
Jess Walter
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If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you're living on the street and you're an addict, it's much harder to find your way out.
Jess Walter
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Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.
Jess Walter
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A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.
Jess Walter
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There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant — sail for Asia and stumble on America — and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.
Jess Walter
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Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
Jess Walter
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For many people it's Facebook, or sports on TV, whatever it is. I have my own demons that I battle. But whatever they are, you wish you could not do them. For most of us it's I cannot get off Facebook. But imagine that your demon has you living on the street. I don't think those compulsions and obsessions are that different.
Jess Walter
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And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, Yes.
Jess Walter
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His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.
Jess Walter
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I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
Jess Walter
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I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
Jess Walter
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What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?
Jess Walter
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Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.
Jess Walter
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I've been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.
Jess Walter
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He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.
Jess Walter
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He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
Jess Walter
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I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
Jess Walter
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He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
Jess Walter