Quotes from Richard Yates

As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter: genuine clarity genuine feeling the right word the exact English sentence the eloquent detail the rigorous dramatization of story

I see,' she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?

She had found in the past that a voluptuously long, hot shower cold be made to seem almost as health-giving as a night's sleep; she had learned too that taking exquisite pains over the selection and putting-on of clothes could sometimes be as good a way as any of helping the hours to pass.

The subjects of her talk didn't matter; he knew what she was really saying. Helpless and gentle, small and tired and anxious to please, she was asking him to agree that her life was not a failure.

Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.

Oh-h-h-h— Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty Who the hell are we? Flim, flam, God damn We're the infantry…

A me pare che un uomo che permette al suo consulente matrimoniale di prendere decisioni al posto suo non è…be', non è un uomo vero

How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up?

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

There was always a dim chance that the job could lead to employment on a real magazine, which might be fun; besides, college had taught her that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind. It didn't matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.

It's the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I've been making you subscribe to it all this time.

Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don't wanna say, 'gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.' You wanna say, 'gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.

When you're talking, Steve," Jock MacKenzie had told him once, "and I don't care who it's to or what it's about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

He was big and sturdy, with a heavy jaw and a voice that made her want to curl up and ride in his pocket like a kitten.

There was probably nothing to be done about a woman like this. Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down.

And maybe things like this really did get better of their own accord, if you gave them time; maybe all you could ever do, beyond suffering, was wait and see what might be going to happen next.

Sometimes in dreams there are visions of the past. For that reason Alice Prentice had always welcomed sleep, but she suffered an insomniac's dread of the time just before sleeping, the act of falling asleep itself, the perilous twilight of semi-awareness when the mind must struggle for coherence, when a siren or a cry in the street is the very sound of terror and the ticking of the clock is a steady reminder of death.

Whoever said you can't love ridiculous things? God knows i love you, and you're the most ridiculous woman I ever met!

almost time to go home—and he had come to rely on the desolate wastes of time that lay between these pleasures as an invalid comes to rely on the certainty of recurring pain. It was a part of him.

And they fell asleep like children.