Quotes from James Purdy

If you get lonesome enough, Carrie knew, you'll even call the police.

One fine day you've got to give your body to somebody, or turn into a fully-fledged zombie.

Carla had the American woman's fixed idea that love can cure, love can heal, love can bind a flowing wound.

I think fame is something that you've achieved in your inner self that becomes known to others outside you. There are really very few famous people in history.

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.

Publishers seem to be in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Well, the publishers have no idea what a writer is.

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he'll never write again. That's our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you're married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn't in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.

Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You're old enough to know better.

Ace sat down and inflated his cheeks like the wind gods in Italian paintings.

Most people have their buttons," Eustace continued.

There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.

But failure has kept Curt at home like a nice warm dachshund.

Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to.

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

Don't shoot me, Sidney, I love you." He had shot him right through the words that still haunted him today, the most perfect words ever said to him.

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won't need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

I have wrote my name in hell," Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

Not all princes he had read about in books of legends are beautiful and noble and carry their heads high.

Don't you believe in death?" I yelled at him. "No," he answers, "and I don't believe in time either...

You fucked-up hunk.

Just like children, he and the greatwoman Grainger longed, and especially demanded even, that something should happen, or again Parkhearst would cry, "A reward, I must have a reward. A reward for life just as I have lived it.

Then giving another taste to his drink, leaving it more than half full, he would make a rather stately progress to the booth, partly closing the door. He would take down the receiver and hesitantly begin speaking into the mouthpiece. Actually Mr. Sendel was talking only to himself. He would talk for several minutes into the silent phone, explaining how worried he was and how despairing it was at his time of life when all or almost all those dear to one have departed.

Maureen had been born with the face of a gargoyle on the body of a sylph.

Your honied words, your honied love. Under all your honey runs a conduit of venom.