66 Quotes by Charles Baxter

Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She’s wreckage. It’s as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

You can’t reconstruct a story – you can’t even know what the story is – if everyone is saying, “Mistakes were made.” Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it’s history anyway, so let’s forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

You think that what I’ve told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.

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

I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.