Richard Yates Quotes

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.

Of course. And isn't that the worst kind of loss? When you don't even realise the value of something until you've thrown it away?

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.

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

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

(and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening's conversation?)

But this isn't a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and then trying to put the best of what we've found into our own work.

The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence

Well, marriage is funny, Mike, Harold said once with the wind whipping the vapor of his voice over his shoulder. You can go along for years without ever knowing who you're married to. It's a riddle. You're right, Michael said. It is. Then maybe once in a while you take a look at this girl, this woman, and you think: What's the deal? How come? Why her? Why me? Yeah, I know what you mean, Harold.