William Kennedy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.”
-- William Kennedy

#Interesting Quotes #Crafts Quotes #Firsts Quotes

“Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.”
-- William Kennedy

Source : William Kennedy (2011). “Roscoe”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

#Memories Quotes #Soul Quotes #Deeds Quotes

“Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.”
-- William Kennedy

Source : William Kennedy (2011). “Roscoe”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

#Sin Quotes #Discouraging Quotes #Wells Quotes

“We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move”
-- William Kennedy

#Moving Quotes #Yesterday Quotes #Wells Quotes

“There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.”
-- William Kennedy

#Hallelujah Quotes #Hoot Quotes #Walks Quotes

“Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.”
-- William Kennedy

#Self Quotes #Voice Quotes #Ego Quotes

“Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”
-- William Kennedy

#Paris Quotes #Issues Quotes #Greek Quotes

“You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.”
-- William Kennedy

#Moving Quotes #Moving Forward Quotes #Imagination Quotes

“Anger makes people stupid.”
-- William Kennedy

Source : William Kennedy (2011). “Very Old Bones”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

#Stupid Quotes #People Quotes

“I'm always looking, as an actor, for activities. I think it's far more interesting to watch what people do than what they say. You always want to watch behavior, because the dialogue as written by our illustrious leaders is great. Eminently playable.”

“I like an interesting movie even if it's controversial or offensive, depending on your taste.”

“I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.”

“To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.”

“I used to be very controlling with visuals and editing, and I would pretty much craft the performances; now I have learned to trust the material and the actors.”

“Good enough is never good enough.”

Source : Alfred Bertram Guthrie (1991). “A field guide to writing fiction”, Harpercollins

“This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.”

“I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.”

“I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.”

“If at first you don't succeed/You can dust it off and try again/Dust yourself off and try again.”

Source : Song: Try Again, Album: I Care 4 U