James Purdy Quotes

All you need do, Bernie,”she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, “is present the truth as fiction.

~ James Purdy

Never deprecate another person's sufferings even when imaginary.

~ James Purdy

But failure has kept Curt at home like a nice warm dachshund.

~ James Purdy

Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to.

~ James Purdy

The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who’s who straight. So don’t be surprised if they don’t remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do.

~ James Purdy

There was the cruel kind of Eustace silence.

~ James Purdy

If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.

~ James Purdy

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won’t need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

~ James Purdy

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

~ James Purdy

And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.

~ James Purdy

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.

~ James Purdy

He’s America in action — opposed to quality.

~ James Purdy

She was a church open only for him, with services in full operation twenty-four hours a day.

~ James Purdy

I have wrote my name in hell,” Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

~ James Purdy

He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete.

~ James Purdy