Top 35 Donald Ray Pollock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Some people were born just so they could be buried.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

2. “Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn’t know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

3. “Knockemstiff is a collection of short stories set in the holler of the same name in southern Ohio where I grew up. I tried to link the stories together through the place and some recurring characters.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

4. “Look, girls don’t care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

5. “I worked in a paper mill all my adult life and there were a lot of funny guys there. So you pick up on that. Even though something really bad might have happened to somebody you can still make a joke out of it.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

6. “I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

7. “A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there’s something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

8. “The Oxys filled holes in me I hadn’t realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

9. “A damp, gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin of a corpse.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

10. “I had this bad habit of not writing out a first draft and going back. For me it was the first sentence, then the second sentence, and I might be several weeks on the first page instead of writing a draft and trying to figure it out from there.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

11. “I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that, I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

12. “Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

13. “Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I’ve read in my life.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

14. “It always gives me a comfort, watching the TV late at night, thinking about all the other people around Ohio watching the same old movie, maybe even thinking the same old thoughts. I picture them curled up on their couches in their living rooms, and all the lonely little sounds of the night drifting in through their window screens.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

15. “It made no sense, the way Americans sometimes went bananas over certain people for absolutely no reason, as if they were just drawing names out of a hat.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

16. “When I turned fifty, I decided to quit the mill and go to graduate school.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

17. “The way I saw the characters these things just happened naturally. At the same time – and I know it’s probably not apparent when you read the book – but I really tried to hold back because I didn’t want it to become a cartoon.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

18. “I took a correspondence course with a guy at Ohio University. He gave me ten exercises, and one of them resulted in the story “Bactine.” It pleased me a lot more than anything else I’d ever done, so I kept messing around and by the time I got to Ohio State I’d written maybe eight stories.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

19. “Id always been a big reader, and I loved books, and I always thought writing would be a great way to get by in the world.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

20. “I remember a class I taught at Ohio State where I assigned a Mary Gaitskill story, which really wasn’t that bad, and I had this one girl refuse to read it. But better that reaction than no reaction at all.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

21. “I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

22. “I was always a big reader, even when everything was bad and miserable.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

23. “When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn’t know anything about, and they just weren’t working.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

24. “I don’t think my book is any more shocking than if I went out right now and brought back your local newspaper and found a story that happened around here yesterday or the day before that’s just as shocking as anything in my book.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

25. “Something broke in him that day. For the first time, he could see that his whole life added up to absolutely nothing.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

26. “There’s no way to turn back now, he thought. But he couldn’t go on like this either. He imagined the door to a sad, empty room closing with a faint click, never to be opened again, and that calmed him a little.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

27. “He thought that sounded nice in a way, just going through your entire life with no more expectations than that. Sometimes he wished he weren’t so ambitious.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

28. “Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

29. “He raised his eyes and searched out a small patch of blue sky visible through the dense, green branches of the pines. A white wisp of cloud drifted by. That’s what dying will be like, he told himself. Just floating up in the air. Nothing bad about that. He smiled a little.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

30. “Arvin needs to have somewhere he can always call home,” she told Willard. “I never did have that.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

31. “The way she saw it, too much religion could be as bad as too little, maybe even worse; but moderation was just not in her husband’s nature.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

32. “As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied?”

— Donald Ray Pollock

33. “Sometimes it seemed as if she spent half of her life crying.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

34. “He had never felt comfortable worshipping God around strangers packed together inside a building.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

35. “Well, brothers,” he said, “ain’t nothing ever gonna be the same now.” “That’s for goddamn sure,” said Chimney, then he gouged his horse in the flanks and the others followed.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

36. “The moon was rising by the time they got there, a sliver of ancient and pitted bone accompanied by a single, shimmering star.”

— Donald Ray Pollock

37. “It wore on you after a while, other people’s accomplishments.”

— Donald Ray Pollock