Quotes from Stewart O'Nan

You can't run from your roots.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.

If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.

I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.

The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.

I've always been a big reader.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.

Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it's a secret of your profession, one people don't want to know.

Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you've only just opened your eyes.

And even you, then, will wonder how you have such hope, and marvel at how impossible it is to stop the heart from reaching out into the whole world.

In Heaven you forget everything. In Hell they make you remember.

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink--this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He'd survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they'd just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.

she was struck by how long life was, and how much time had passed, and she wished she could go back and apologize to those closest to her, explain that she understood now. Impossible, and yet the urge to return and be a different person never lessened, grew only more acute.

It frightens you how practical you can be, how cold, even with your own.

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole—like the world, or the person you loved.

Getting sentimental, you say, but who are you fooling, you've always been.

If all of this has taught you anything, it's that hope is easier to get rid of than sorrow.

Success to him meant having the time to do nothing.

Damn straight I'm lucky, I thought. I'm a Red Sox fan.

These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer -- all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.