182 Quotes by Jess Walter

If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you’re living on the street and you’re an addict, it’s much harder to find your way out.

Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.

And it’s a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death.

I don’t know a family that isn’t touched by some sort of addiction.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it’s how you teach yourself to write.

I love humor in writing, so I’ve written to the thing that’s funny, there’s the joke, but then I just kept going. I started thinking about all the bikes I’ve had stolen, and that got me thinking about crime, and that got me thinking about the city I’m in.

You take something from your past that you’re somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character’s point of view.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that’s okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn’t – and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness – here is yet another person I will never see again.