Padgett Powell quotes:

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.

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

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.

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.

But crossing into Louisiana I got this haunted little rill of feeling -- there was moss and mud everywhere and an inexplicable, hollow sensation that Louisiana is what would be left of the South after it has been nuked -- that I and everything around me were irretrievably rotten.

Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.

Heavy booze is a big time vacation, but you come back with a headache.

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

disputing nothing is the first step through the difficult door of happiness

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

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.

Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications. 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. It's a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States. It used to be the only people who had tattoos were in the navy, in prison, or working at a carnival.

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting,

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

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?