"The illusion of control has to be there, but mostly I'm following characters and the consequences of their own decisions, because a lot of the time they made decisions about what to do or how to behave that I had no idea were coming down the pike. As I would sit and try to inhabit a character, they themselves in my imagination would have quite a bit of free will."

-- Bob Shacochis

#Character Quotes #Imagination Quotes #Decision Quotes

“I sort of lived half my life in California, half in England, so I am, I suppose, a little bit American.”
“I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me.”
“I am often the brunt of my own humor.”
“While I was watching you, exotic words drifted across the mirror of my mind as summer clouds drift across the sky.”
“You lose with potential.Â You win with performance.”
“It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh.”
“the real killer was when you married the wrong person but had the right children.”

Source : Ann Beattie (2011). “Falling in Place”, p.47, Vintage
“There is no way to greatness. Greatness is the way.”

You may also like:

Annie Baker
Playwright
Bruce Barcott
Journalist
David Quammen
Writer
Ian Frazier
Writer
Philipp Meyer
Fiction writer
Susan Orlean
Journalist
Sven Birkerts
Essayist
Tim Cahill
Writer
Marisa Silver
Author