Quotes from Charles Baxter

His was the kind of beauty for which you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow and all the varieties of rage. Eventually, you would have to go to church to get rid of him.

Art is not a sack race.

Oh", he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn't a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.

You can't reconstruct a story—you can't even know what the story is—if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

If you're smart, you keep happiness to yourself.

Experience and disappointments had made us methodical.

The loss of innocence, and the arrival of knowingness, can become an addiction.

intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She's wreckage. It's as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.

Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in the front row of a theater, where the actors' spit lands on your face.

When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.

Against the odds, they refuse to succeed.

Their imaginations put the scene on a film loop. Guiltily, they watched it until their mental screens began to wash the rest of the past away.

The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.

Once someone has bound your heart, he's the only person who can let it loose again.

At least with pets, and for all I know , people too, intelligence and quick-wittiness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

Anyway, what I've just told you was what prompted the chair incident. I had grown big, and he was trying to belittle me.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch.

Creating a scene is thus the staging of a desire.

I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.

You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.

Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.

The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.