108 Quotes by Richard Yates

With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people.

He had won but he didn’t feel like a winner.

If you lived like a proletarian long enough, among proletarians, weren’t you almost certain to become a proletarian too?

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like “x numbers of dollars”. At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said “x number of dollars” three times.

In the meantime, and this was the best part, in the meantime it was no longer necessary to dislike them.

Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents – it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.

It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.

He’s been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he’s come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he’s an art bum...

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn’t mean there’d be any way to keep from knowing it was there.