Richard Yates Quotes

Revolutionary Road, no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection.

and for an hour or two they talked in circles.

Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary, [Yates] wrote, is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.

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.

We had a few beers and laughed more than we meant to and punched each other's arms; in the end, out on the sidewalk again, I think we shook hands about three times in saying goodbye. Just before turning away he said "Listen, though: don't look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way."

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?

Sometimes the world was just too fucking much.

she talked less, or at least did less of the kind of talking whose only purpose was to fill silence

It seemed only a few minutes later that he woke with a sense that the world was coming apart.

Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937-39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough [i.e. Stephen Benedict], whose amateur theatre group ("The Beechwood Players") served as the original for "The Laurel Players" in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: "Revolutionary Road".

these lives don't seem worth the trouble he has given them.

And from this distance they all did look like kids - boys and girls from far and wide with their cheap hand luggage and their Army duffel bags, brave entertainers who might travel for years before it occurred to them, or to most of them, that they weren't going anywhere.

exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in.

All of this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. "Why aren't you writing?" he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), "Why aren't you revising this? You should be constantly revising!" Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: "How could I improve it? he'd fire back [...] Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realise that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else.

Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were "too nice": "See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.' Think about them, and the hell with the reader's sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do." Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting