Quotes from Padgett Powell

I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.

I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.

I stuff animals I find; I do roadkill. They're strangely fun to have. They're like easy-to-control pets.

If the observation were made to you that Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met, would you be inclined to agree?

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting

The main thing is: Don't take any shit. That's the main thing. The unmain thing is: You are not going to figure anything out except how to get other people to take shit, so forget about everything except not taking any yourself.

Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any food banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth.

Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart?

the levity of the doomed has no equal.

in a new world behave in a new way as a new man. unhorse the conquistador.

alternate the theories you entertain about all things.

in the event that armed men of any sort enter the building, watch their feet closely.

try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person.

life is a time when you get pleasure until somebody get your ass. and one of the ways to prolong pleasure is to not chop up time with syllables.

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling -- there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked -- that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten.

Do you try to listen to calssical music but feel you don't ever really advance past knowing it's better than it sounds?

don't hesitate to insulate your house, especially the floor.

the new world may be in fact a very, very, very, very old world.

apply shingles from the bottom up.

You don't have to pay me to tell you this but this a dream born of depression. That's all it is. So what do I do? No idea. Stay awake. Good idea.