Charles Baxter quotes:

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Everybody should customize their names.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you ...

Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

There is no weather in malls.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn't have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.

I don't think that most women have to prove that they're real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.

Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.