Quotes from Ron Carlson

No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do. It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen.

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me.

I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.

I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.

I always write from my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

We live in a society that doesn't offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren't clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It's going to be a mess before you're finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we'll call it the draft of a story.

Get down, get naked, get savage.

THE TABLECLOTH OF TURIN

I always write from experience, whether I've had them or not.

When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing.

The world is glutted with magnificent three-page starts, and the road to hell is paved with unfinished manuscripts.

I was young those nights, but I was getting over it.

All of the valuable writing I have done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room.

My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.

I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge.

I have these habits. I'm not a crazy artist. Or am I?

I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.