Top 60 Charles Baxter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”

— Charles Baxter

2. “There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”

— Charles Baxter

3. “When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”

— Charles Baxter

4. “Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it’s more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.”

— Charles Baxter

5. “Savor the imminent weirdness of the day.”

— Charles Baxter

6. “A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.”

— Charles Baxter

7. “When blame has been assigned, the story is over.”

— Charles Baxter

8. “Literature is not an instruction manual.”

— Charles Baxter

9. “Literature is not a sack race. There aren’t real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.”

— Charles Baxter

10. “There’s nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.”

— Charles Baxter

11. “Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.”

— Charles Baxter

12. “Creating a scene is thus the staging of a desire.”

— Charles Baxter

13. “Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.”

— Charles Baxter

14. “Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again.”

— Charles Baxter

15. “There is no weather in malls.”

— Charles Baxter

16. “If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.”

— Charles Baxter

17. “When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.”

— Charles Baxter

18. “You can’t reconstruct a story – you can’t even know what the story is – if everyone is saying, “Mistakes were made.” Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it’s history anyway, so let’s forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.”

— Charles Baxter

19. “When I’m writing, I’m waiting to see somebody, and I’m waiting to hear them. It’s almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.”

— Charles Baxter

20. “In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.”

— Charles Baxter

21. “Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.”

— Charles Baxter

22. “As one gets older, the story of Hansel and Gretel becomes more interesting only when told from the point of view of the witch.”

— Charles Baxter

23. “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.”

— Charles Baxter

24. “Ethics is a dream.”

— Charles Baxter

25. “When you break the heart of the philosopher, you must apply great force and cunning strategy, but when the deed is completed, the heart lies in great stony ruin at your feet. If you succeed in breaking it, the job is done once and for all. It will not be repaired.”

— Charles Baxter

26. “What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you...”

— Charles Baxter

27. “At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.”

— Charles Baxter

28. “Before, I was always trying to make my relationships work by means of willpower and forced affability. This time I didn’t have to strive for anything. A quality of ease spread over us.”

— Charles Baxter

29. “At least with pets, and for all I know, people too, intelligence and quick-wittedness have nothing to do with a talent for being loved, or being kind, nothing at all, less than nothing.”

— Charles Baxter

30. “The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.”

— Charles Baxter

31. “The truth is that I’m never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.”

— Charles Baxter

32. “Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.”

— Charles Baxter

33. “When readers don’t like the book, it’s usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.”

— Charles Baxter

34. “It’s my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.”

— Charles Baxter

35. “Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.”

— Charles Baxter

36. “I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.”

— Charles Baxter

37. “As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it’s the unhappy ones who create the stories. I’m no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.”

— Charles Baxter

38. “You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I’m a malcontent and you can’t change that.”

— Charles Baxter

39. “I am pleased to have an enemy who is not symbolic.”

— Charles Baxter

40. “The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.”

— Charles Baxter

41. “I looked to my left and saw a gorgonzola-green automobile in the driveway.”

— Charles Baxter

42. “You’ll have your heart cut out with a grapefruit knife; love does that. You won’t have a chance against me until you’re very old, if then.”

— Charles Baxter

43. “I have to let her remain here if she wants to. She’s wreckage. It’s as simple as that. We have these obligations to our human ruins.”

— Charles Baxter

44. “You think that what I’ve told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.”

— Charles Baxter

45. “I don’t think that most women have to prove that they’re real women. You live long enough, you graduate to being real.”

— Charles Baxter

46. “The crazy ones are mostly crazy because love made them that way.”

— Charles Baxter

47. “The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.”

— Charles Baxter

48. “Everybody should customize their names.”

— Charles Baxter

49. “And in my night confusion it is as if I can hear the leaves being gnawed, the forest being eaten alive, shred by shred. I cannot bear it. They are not mild, these moths. Their appetites are blindingly voracious, obsessive. An acquaintance has told me that the Navahos refer to someone with an emotional illness as “moth crazy.”

— Charles Baxter

50. “My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.”

— Charles Baxter