61 Quotes by Padgett Powell

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

If the observation were made to you that “Strangers become intimate, and as intimacy grows they lower their guards and less mind their manners until errors are made, which decreases intimacy until estrangement exceeds that which existed before the strangers ever met,” would you be inclined to agree?

I don’t know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

Writing books is a nice retreat. There’s nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.