American - Novelist | April 25, 1952 -
I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.
Padgett Powell
GoodBookThinkWantWillHim
I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.
PeopleStoryViewDownSayWant
All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
RestGeniusDownKindTalkWit
I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.
PlanGuiltySaidSayWriteFirst
I stuff animals I find; I do roadkill. They're strangely fun to have. They're like easy-to-control pets.
FunFindAnimalsPetsLikeStuff
Every other year, I was the new boy. I found that the only way to survive was to embrace it, make a little fortress on the outside and to pretend to blend in but not to invest too much because you'll be somewhere else next year.
SurviveYearYouToo MuchNewWay
Military brats have this toughness: they're almost like orphans or foster children; they develop little mechanisms. It sets you up to look at things a little differently.
ChildrenYouLookToughnessMilitary
I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.
MomentEndSayFairHimSpectrum
They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.
MeLoseParisLostReviewOut
I was a commercial roofer before this, until about age thirty. I will not work others under me and do not want to work under others.
WorkAgeMeWantWillThirty
I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
I AmWritingBookSpeakTalkingTwo
As a boy, I was a member of a club run by the famous reptile showman Ross Allen, and the club sent its members pseudoscientific papers mimeographed on construction paper with a three-hole punch.
ConstructionFamousBoyRunClub
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Padgett Powell quotes