182 Quotes by Jess Walter

Stories are nations, empires.

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

She saw death as just another wedding she wasn’t invited to.

People can handle an unjust world; it’s when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.

As Albert Camus once said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And as Jessamyn West said, “Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures.” And as my kids said, “Dad, that sounds made up.

The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don’t think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don’t think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It’s easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

Oh, the things she would say if she could – but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.

He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once – his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead – and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.