Richard Yates Quotes

And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all.

You don't have much use for black people, do you, Mr Wilder? Deep down you wish we'd all go away. You think our lips are too thick and our noses too flat and you shudder at the thought of our kinky hair. Isn't that about right, Mr Wilder?

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

Charlie was Charlie: possessed of "an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people's weaknesses," as Yates put it. Footnote by Blake Bailey: The quote is taken from the 1972 Ploughshares interview. Yates was explaining how his brother-in-law's personality was similar to that of John Givings in "Revolutionary Road".

The first drink tasted so good that he let her do most of the talking while he savored it, sitting beside her and watching her profile. The tip of her small nose bobbed very slightly up and down at each syllable beginning with p, b or m, and that seemed a lovely thing for a girl's nose to do.

It's often occurred to me, she said, that 'friend' is about the most treacherous word in the language.

"Keep a tight asshole" became a favourite motto in times of adversity.

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.

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

Yates viewed Gloria [Cold Spring Harbor] as the best likeness of Dookie [his own real-life mother] he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader's sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, "the hell with the reader's sympathies". Which, in a nutshell, may explain why Cold Spring Harbor didn't sell and why, for that matter, Yates's books [kept] going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later. [...] If Yates seemed to vacillate between "acceptance and revulsion" towards his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis.

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

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

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?

"Well, she's - sweet," he told her. "She's very sweet, and I guess that's part of the trouble. She's like a little girl - is a little girl.

Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.