66 Quotes by Charles Baxter

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

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

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.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

There’s nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.