Quotes by Jincy Willett

...(W)here theres drama, theres crap.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.

Arithmetic is the death of story.

All plots are cliche.

(D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When youre writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We dont say Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.

(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking. (Jincy Willett)

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

If something was worth writing down, it was worth writing down in full. And she had a horror of lists--grocery lists, Christmas card lists, and most grisly of all, to-do lists. Lists, like appointment books, were nails driven into the future. She knew this was an odd objection to be raised by a person whose daily life was utterly predictable, who never threw caution, or anything else, to the winds, who never packed light, because she never packed at all. Still, the future was a sleeping monster, not to be poked.

Jenny Marzen is who again? Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didnt know it. And Jenny is my number one fan?No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school.What is she, twelve?The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says youve got gravitas.Thats a dirty lie. I never even had mono.

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still hed managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldnt last a week in GenPop.

I thought, you see, that there must be some connection between money and memorable experience; between rare wine and rare intelligence. In short, I was a romantic idiot.

Actually, the Snipers sense of humor frightened Amy more than anything else. The parody of Carlas poem had been witty, the rudeness of Marvys critique outlandish, and she was still, for some reason, focused on that youse in the Snipers counterfeit email. Youse was like a spectral elbow to Amys ribs. Dangerous, malevolent people should not be amusing. In order to be humorous, you had to have perspective, to be able to stand outside yourself and your own needs and grudges and fears and see yourself for the puny ludicrous creature you really are. How could somebody do that and still imagine himself entitled to harry, to wound, to kill?

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. Its just too bad.

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldnt come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. Help! was such a cliche. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. Why didnt you say something? they wanted to know, and she said, Im not a screamer. Jesus, said one of them, couldnt you have made an exception this one time? Apparently not, she said.

Carla was wearing a No Fear sweatshirt. You are too old, Amy wanted to tell her, for legible clothing.