Quotes from Richard Yates

Se si vuole fare qualcosa di assolutamente onesto, qualcosa di vero, alla fine si scopre sempre che è una cosa che va fatta da soli.

How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you've lost all your belief in yourself?

Sometimes it seemed that he'd said six or eight funny things in his life, and that what passed for his sense of humor would always depend on a skillful recycling of old material, over and over again.

he was too short a man to do this gracefully

he wanted to discuss his strange compulsion to let people know the worst about himself—this confusion of what was weak and ugly in himself with what was "interesting

If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren't you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

while the teletypes chugged and rang and the Wall Street tickers ticked and everybody around me argued baseball, until it was mercifully time to go home.

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up

Why not let well enough alone? As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn't it simple logic to expect that he'd be limited to intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of women?

But it didn't last.

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

It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

if you don't try at anything, you can't fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs.