Quotes from James Purdy

I can describe my books as I seem them as American, imaginative, symbolic. My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne, and Melville.

If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.

I don't have any home. Everyone I grew up with, my family, are all dead. So I feel kind of like a ghost. I'm more interested in the past.