Quotes from Charles Baxter

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

Say what you will about it, Hell is story friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it.

Hell is the proof of God's failure or refusal to love.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

This was his cure for low spirits. When you pour your first cup of coffee of the day, if you're feeling crummy, put a dab of ice cream into it. It's festive. Then you gotta trudge off like everybody else, like I said, but you got the ice cream with you. Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising.

After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

You'll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won't have a chance against me until you're very old, if then.

Is there anything more restorative than the act of one person reading a beloved book to another person, also beloved? Slowly, I returned to my senses.

Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me.

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

He only loved his love for me

To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn't believe in giving advice, even when asked.

I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway.

Wherever you go online, the Big Computer knows what you want before you want it. It's ready for you and waits patiently, humming. It knows where you will be tomorrow and what you will be doing, and it carefully calibrates the shame you carry with you in hopes that you will buy something to restore your peace of mind.

Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it.

Ethics is a dream, and tenderness a daytime phantasm, lost when night comes.

If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.

Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn't have sleepless nights, how can he hope to cause sleepless nights in anyone else?

Literature is not an instruction manual. For obvious reasons, this is rarely noted in fiction.

To the beautiful falls the right of command, he observes, quoting Aristotle, although he adds that this situation is not always just.

And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves being gnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They are not mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. An acquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotional illness as "moth crazy.

Their souls are usually heavy and managerial.