Quotes from Robert Coover

She made them all laugh and forget for a moment that they were dying men.

It was almost like there was something wicked about growing up.

I nearly drownded on the Big River back home, but I didn't. Instead, I come to love the river, though the river never loved me. That's how it was with this horse. Ever so splendid and mighty, but indifferent as running water.

In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence.

She tumbles into a corner of the terrace and cowers there, whimpering, pale and terrified, as the caretaker's son, breathing heavily, back stooped and buttocks tensed, circles her, prepared to spring.

What do you think of our babysitter?' Dolly asks, adjusting a garter. 'Oh, I hardly noticed,' he says. 'Cute girl. She seems to get along fine with the kids. Why?

She strives, understanding the futility of it, for perfection.

If I'd knowed we'd be a-finding gold, I'd a stayed down in the tepee, because there ain't much worse can happen to a body

And what mostly made that feller a loser was he didn't want nuthin' bad enough.

I have found, Mr. Noir, that if you make a story with gaps in it, people just step in to fill them up, they can't help themselves.

I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history,' intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, 'and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut.

Tribes, I says. They're a powerful curse laid on you when you get born. They ruin you, but you can't get away from them. They're a nightmare a body's got to live with in the day time.

Writing students are notoriously conservative creatures. They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read. Getting them to try out alternative or innovative forms is harder than talking them into chastity as a life style.

God never does nothing wrong [...]. He's always loving, fair, honest'n pure, like the preachers say. He knows everthing and He's more powerful than anything else or anybody who's ever lived nor never's gonna live. I believe that. I got to. But sometimes, when things happen, it's all so hard to take in. Our brains is just too puny. And the question is"—she's sobbing now—"why didn't He make them bigger?

The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy).

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

I learned my realism from guys like Kafka.

Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It's the most insane thing we do.

The superhero, his underwear bagging at the seat and knees, is just a country boy at heart, tutored to perceive all human action as good or bad, orderly or dynamic, and so doesn't know whether to shit or fly.

When you're living with a mob of other people, it's hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain't YOU no more.

People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.

Well, I think of you as a straight shooter, Sheriff, but one who can't stop lustin' after the goddamn ineffable.' "She said that, hunh?" "Yup." "Shitfire, Sheriff, what'd you do?" "Well, I shot her.

Bottom half of the seventh, Brock's boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry's heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on!

What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang.