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Jess Walter Quotes | Quotes said by Jess Walter

  • Jess Walter Quote #1

    (…) met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter B or maybe the insect Bee, not sure, her long blond hair pulled in a ponytail, her no-doubt banging body effortlessly buried beneath a pile of tights and sweaters and scarves – she is a walking coat rack – and as we shook hands, Bea fixed me with the most alarming blue-eyed stare of my life, the kind of stare in which you think some potent subliminal message is being passed along (Run away with me or maybe just Run away), (…)


  • Jess Walter Quote #2

    (…) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)

  • Jess Walter Quote #3

    All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

  • Jess Walter Quote #4

    All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

  • Jess Walter Quote #5

    All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell.

  • Jess Walter Quote #6

    Always speak first to the toughest person in the room.

  • Jess Walter Quote #7

    Among the world's evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school.

  • Jess Walter Quote #8

    And while his mother's lecture had gone over his seven-year-old head, Pasquale saw now what she meant--how much easier life would be if our intentions and our desires could always be aligned.

  • Jess Walter Quote #9

    erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires.

  • Jess Walter Quote #10

    He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

  • Jess Walter Quote #11

    He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.

  • Jess Walter Quote #12

    He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

  • Jess Walter Quote #13

    Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?
    Redemption, Shane says.

  • Jess Walter Quote #14

    I don't know what I expected – no
    maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface-
    but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino
    at the beginning of The Godfather
    reasonably bemused, untouched by his
    criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton
    whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep
    with the fishes, or like Al Pacino
    from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually,
    now that I think about it, he's not
    like Al Pacino at all but more like
    Kevin Spacey from that film, and who's
    ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?

  • Jess Walter Quote #15

    I guess I forgot we were going out tonight.
    We always go out on Fridays.
    It's Thursday, Alvis.
    You are so tied to routine.

  • Jess Walter Quote #16

    I have this theory, that this will be the only city that future archaeologists find, Las Vegas. The dry climate will preserve it all and teams of scientists in the year 5000 will carefully sweep and scrape away the sand to find pyramids and castles and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline and stripper poles and snapper cards and these future archaeologists will re-create our entire culture based solely on this one shallow and cynical little shithole. We can complain all we want that this city doesn’t represent us. We can say, Yes, but I hated Las Vegas. Or I only went there once. Well, I’m sure not all Romans reveled in the torture-fests at the Colosseum either, but there it is.

  • Jess Walter Quote #17

    I think most Hollywood meetings are silly and I truly despise pitching. It's insane to expect someone to come in and tell you the story before they've written it, and buying an idea from someone who can explain it rather than write it is like choosing a mechanic based on his ability to draw a picture of your car's problem.

  • Jess Walter Quote #18

    Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.

  • Jess Walter Quote #19

    If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah.

  • Jess Walter Quote #20

    It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.

  • Jess Walter Quote #21

    It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire.

  • Jess Walter Quote #22

    Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.

  • Jess Walter Quote #23

    My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.

  • Jess Walter Quote #24

    Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.

  • Jess Walter Quote #25

    The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.

  • Jess Walter Quote #26

    This is a love story, Michael Deane says.
    But, really, what isn’t? Doesn’t the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go crazy for scallops, and the pawnshop guys adore their junk just as the Housewives live for catching glimpses of their own Botoxed brows in gilded hall mirrors, and the rocked-out dude on ‘roids totally wants to shred the ass of the tramp-tatted girl on Hookbook, and because this is reality, they are all in love—madly, truly—with the body mic clipped to their back buckle, and the producer casually suggesting just one more angle, one more Jell-O shot. And the robot loves his master, alien loves his saucer, Superman loves Lois, Lex, and Lana, Luke love Leia (till he finds out she’s his sister), and the exorcist loves the demon even as he leaps out the window with it, in full soulful embrace, as Leo loves Kate and they both love the sinking ship, and the shark—God, the shark loves to eat, which is what the Mafioso loves, too—eating and money and Paulie and omerta` --the way the cowboy loves his horse, loves the corseted girl behind the piano bar, and sometimes loves the other cowboy, as the vampire loves night and neck, and the zombie—don’t even start with the zombie, sentimental fool; has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? This, too, is a love story.

  • Jess Walter Quote #27

    True sacrifice is painless.

  • Jess Walter Quote #28

    Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.

  • Jess Walter Quote #29

    Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

  • Jess Walter Quote #30

    Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway--its true religion? Wasn't the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral?...what was that but a religion?

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