Richard Yates Quotes

All I'm trying to say is that I'm afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think, Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?

Her face, in the spattered mirror, was a shocked and wild-eyed ruin.

"I see," she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?

Could a person really be cynical about everything in the world and still expect to have friends?

Where are the windows? he demanded, spreading his hands. That's the question. Where does the light come in?

"There's something we have to discuss," she said, and from the way she said it he knew it wouldn't be a discussion at all. She had something to tell him - something he wouldn't like - and he had better shut up and sit down and listen.

Late in the afternoon the company cooks brought food up to the village for the first hot meal they'd had since Belgium - salmon patties, dehydrated potatoes, and canned fruit salad - and most of the men seemed in high spirits as they sat or squatted over their mess kits in the street. "What kind of catshit is this?" "Salmon-patty catshit, that's what kind."

But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates 'The Great Gatsby' was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definite milestone of his apprenticeship: Gatsby, Yates declared, was "his formal introduction to the craft." Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates's early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in 'Nine Stories'.

She too was a divorced mother, though her former husband had vanished long ago and was referred to only as "that bastard" or "that cowardly son of a bitch".

You know? he said. This is the kind of thing that really— he paused, examining the wisp of smoke that curled from his wet pipestem. Really makes you stop and think.

As [Richard Yates] explained in a 1972 interview, his characters "all rush around trying to do their best—trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are. That's what brings on the calamity at the end." Yates's compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work [...]. Yates also tended to be hard on characters based on himself. But all are worthy of our sympathy in at least one respect: They try to do their best but fail because of limitations over which they have no control.

Then they came out, Finney wearing the foolish smile you sometimes see in the crowds that gape at street accidents

Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters [...] because "they can't help being the people they are" —Yates's explicit vision of tragedy.

Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate, nor write coherent English cornered me to demand, frankly, whether I thought she Had Talent. Tried to evade the question for twenty minutes, and ended up saying sure. Depressing experience.... [I've] pretty well decided that teaching does sap the old creative energy after all. Why do so many sad clowns want to be writers? It's hard, no fun, scrambles your brains and leaves you unfit for practically all other kinds of human activity. Apart from which there's no dough in it except for Leon Uris and Allen Drury.

And he didn't mind at all. Downstairs and outdoors and alone again, back in the trampled dust in front of the place, he pitied the drab supervisor and all her quick, harried, frowning children because none of them looked as though they had anything worth waiting for, tonight or ever.