17 Quotes by Robert Boswell

Americans were no more shallow than any other people, just more pampered, so they had come to treasure their shallowness, making pop singers and television actors their most revered leaders. Pampered but lovable. He loved America, even though he held it in contempt. Love and contempt were not incompatible. In fact, one was rarely found without the other.

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

Ideology is the light that creates darkness.

The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way.

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.