Quotes from Jesse Kellerman

Trying to catch hold of yourself is a fool's errand. There is no you, only a series of former yous, created in one instant, deleted in the next.

I used to live in New York, and I know a number of people who have friends who work at galleries. I spent time hanging out with them, going to openings. It was a good way to do research, to hang out and to look at the art that was present.

It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

In general, the human race is still a young organism.

Charisma is a mysterious and powerful thing. I have it in limited supply, and that which I do have functions under highly specialized conditions.

in seduction, as in all forms of marketing, form superseds content.

for what is love, if not the willingness to repeat oneself?

Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a- or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic.

She sees now that the problem of the girl will never be solved, not as long as people have the capacity to reproduce themselves. Family is the problem that recurs.

People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.