Quotes from Robert Olen Butler

The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.

Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

The monitor presently shows the Windows Blue Screen of Death, though this does not alarm him, as the BSoD is the universal screen saver in Hell.

And so, given the musical sensibilities Hatcher treasured in his earthly life, it is hard to exaggerate the severity of his torture at standing naked in his tiny kitchen in Hell as former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sings a Bee Gees disco song backed by a full studio orchestra and Robin and Maurice.

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.

I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.

And William says, I lost one son utterly.... ...So I've held my tongue. But the truth is you didn't go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn't even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, 'Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.

the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by "understanding" it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.

If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness

I think, by the way, that's why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you're less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it's technique, you think about it. If it's your socks, it's not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that's what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.

the man you watched die yesterday doesn't exist today; he fell to yesterday's bullets and you've got today's bullets to deal with. Nevertheless, sometimes it got me to brooding.

overstuffed, out-of-period wingbacks and a matching couch sat before a walk-in fireplace;

They are in the shapes of dragons and unicorns and stars and boats and horses and hares and toads. We light candles inside them and we swing them on sticks in the dark and the village is full of these wonderful pinwheels of light, the rushing of these bright shapes.

Which reminds me," I said. "You got my pistol?" "Smith." "And Wesson?" "Ben Smith.

I figured how it maybe was a sign that a man and a woman were actually becoming something together when you could be comfortable in long silences.

uninflected silence

The lamb," she said. I didn't understand at first. Things had suddenly gotten serious enough that my first thought was that she was segueing into speaking of religion. But it was simply dinner.

Mr. Cobb," he said. And in just those two words his Boston Back Bay accent rolled over me as dramatically as if he were one of my mother's leading men making an entrance, the "Mister" coasting on a schwa to a vanished "r

Your feature work is as good as anything by Richard Harding Davis.

I could see through it, but that didn't make the more difficult thing any less difficult. What did help, in this particular moment, was the sharp nip of pain on my fingertips. The match was still burning.

who no doubt honored a keen memory as a sign—bogus though it was in and of itself—of intelligence: