Jess Walter Quotes

The truth hurts only if you’re comforted by lies.

The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatm...

About Author

Jess Walter (born July 20, 1965) is an American author of seven novels, two collections of short stories, and a non-fiction book. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006.

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.

You don't really want my side of the story. You don't want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside of my head. You don't want to feel the things I've felt. You just want to know that one thing: why...

There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring? In

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to you...

No one gets to tell you what your life means!

In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. It’s a lazy m...

Couldn't you outgrow the little-girl fantasy? Couldn't love be gentler, smaller, quiter, not quite all-consuming?

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

Great fiction tells unknown truths.

The scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had...

Buried by random events, ruined by confusion and grief.

Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.

To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t come that way now. So when Vicki decided her family would follow Old Testam...

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. He needed coffee.

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

Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.

He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.

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 a...