61 Quotes by Padgett Powell

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.

I’ve had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one’s potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.

That’s part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

Even if you’re the worst writer in the world, at least you’ll have the evidence.

There’s a lot of phones; but I’m out of that field. They make me feel like a prisoner of war; there’s not going to be any texting for me. The pre-paid phone is the frontier of my technological advance.

An indigo snake leaves a lasting impression.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.