182 Quotes by Jess Walter

How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?” She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?

I realized the structure in a collection is how they’re put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be – that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself.

I’m a professional. So before I published any novels, I’d always been writing stories.

You can’t just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It’s how people end up married.

Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world.

I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.

Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.

He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.