Peter Orner Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  45 Copy quote

• Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

  Peter Orner

  Traction

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• 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. Here’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, Passion

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

  Peter Orner

  Honesty, Dark, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.

  Peter Orner

  People, Awkward, Vision

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

  Peter Orner

  Teaching, Firsts, Prison

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

  Peter Orner

  Thinking, Stories, Ends

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.

  Peter Orner

  Powerful, Thinking, Silence

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had written some of these stories. I really didn't. I am a different person now. It's weird. I think if stories are good, they have to have a life of their own that's independent of the writer. I like to think of my characters out there in other peoples' heads. That's a nice thing to think about.

  Peter Orner

  Mistake, Nice, Book

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.

  Peter Orner

  Book, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

  Peter Orner

  Soul, Emotion

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• As a professor I can't teach writing.

  Peter Orner

  Writing, Teach

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.

  Peter Orner

  People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

  Peter Orner

  Trying, Mystery, Novel

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

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