66 Quotes by Charles Baxter

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

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.

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

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

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".)

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

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

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.