Top 15 Richard Yates Quotes

On December 16, 1992, Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut hosted a memorial service for Yates at the Century Club in Manhattan. In his eulogy Vonnegut spoke of the "forced march" he'd made through all nine of Yates's books before preparing his remarks: "Not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence and clarity."

At the time of [Richard Yates's] death the novel [Uncertain Times] was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Nor did he bother to get out much.

In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over "the desolate wastes of time" that had diminished his productivity.

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.

The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence

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

"It took me a long time to figure out... that the best way to handle [the couple's dialogue] was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication." In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away".

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.