Peter Orner famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.
-- Peter Orner

#Teacher #Book #Reading
Actually, youâ€™re not famous at all. Maybe youâ€™ll get some traction after youâ€™re dead?
-- Peter Orner
Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Hereâ€™s a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down.
-- Peter Orner

#Real #Book #Heart
Rarely is the pain of losing someone expressed with such directness, energy, and, yes, humor. The grief in Evan Kuhlman'sWolf Boyis palpable, and so is the flawed, honest humanity of his characters. Here is real loss and somehow, real catharsis.
-- Peter Orner

#Pain #Real #Grief
John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections human beings make, that in spite of everything, we will always make. To quote from the book, 'What he saw in the people was what the old anthropologists called communitas. It wasn't that the people sang and moved. It was their singing and moving together' Singing and moving together, Wood has found a way to express this profound and beautiful idea through fiction.
-- Peter Orner

#Beautiful #Moving #Book
Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move.
-- Peter Orner

#Moving #Grateful #Mean
A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding a place but the soul of its people.
-- Peter Orner

#Rivers #People #Understanding
Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?
-- Peter Orner

#Traction
I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.
-- Peter Orner

#Unhappy #Happy Family #Agree
There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something that I have held dear. When something happens, the first thing you want to do is tell it. That's almost more exciting. It's almost simultaneous with the experience; you are already telling something incredible while it's happening. The stories that everybody carries around and repeats, I am really interested in that.
-- Peter Orner

#Incredibles #Scene #Exciting
I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.
-- Peter Orner

#Teaching #Firsts #Prison
If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.
-- Peter Orner

#Thinking #Stories #Ends
I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment.
-- Peter Orner

#Yoga #Nuts #Live In The Moment
I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.
-- Peter Orner

#Stories #Done #Right Words
I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.
-- Peter Orner

#Thinking #Unhappy #Sometimes
I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.
-- Peter Orner

#Real #Character #Mean
Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totally fascinated with.
-- Peter Orner

#World #Stranger
To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.
-- Peter Orner

#Character #Thinking #Giving
I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.
-- Peter Orner

#Book #Trying
I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.
-- Peter Orner

#People
I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.
-- Peter Orner

#Notebook #Teacher #Crazy
I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.
-- Peter Orner

#Block #Writing
I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?
-- Peter Orner

#Memories #Thinking #Remember
I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.
-- Peter Orner

#Writing #Thinking #Shopping
I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it.
-- Peter Orner

#Writing #Fiction #Helping
I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.
-- Peter Orner

#Stories #Done #Beats

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