Quotes from Jess Walter

Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all.

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'

Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.

My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script.

My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house.

With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way.

There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love.

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.

You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet

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.

Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.

He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.

The whole world is sick...we've all got this pathetic need to be seen. We're a bunch of fucking toddlers trying to get attention.

The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.

What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough?

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.