Charles Baxter Quotes

Ethics is a dream.

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter

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

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter

The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

~ Charles Baxter

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, Charity.)

~ Charles Baxter

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

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

~ Charles Baxter

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

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter

After all, addiction is just the last stage of consumerism.

~ Charles Baxter

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

~ Charles Baxter

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.

~ Charles Baxter