112 Quotes by Amy Hempel

What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true – nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

I’ve always known when I start a story what the last line is. It’s always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don’t know how it’s going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.

Obviously, in journalism, you’re confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it’s in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

The only time the word baby doesn’t scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell – you know, I can’t wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.

When the beer is gone, so are they – flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon bubble.