Top 80 Jess Walter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “And even if they don’t find what they’re looking for, isn’t it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?”

— Jess Walter

2. “Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

— Jess Walter

3. “As Albert Camus once said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And as Jessamyn West said, “Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures.” And as my kids said, “Dad, that sounds made up.”

— Jess Walter

4. “If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet.”

— Jess Walter

5. “And it’s a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death.”

— Jess Walter

6. “If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent.”

— Jess Walter

7. “This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.”

— Jess Walter

8. “Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life – not so much with the woman, whom he didn’t even know, but with the moment.”

— Jess Walter

9. “I come from a newspaper background, so maybe Im attuned to current events.”

— Jess Walter

10. “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. – Milan Kundera.”

— Jess Walter

11. “But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?”

— Jess Walter

12. “What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead?”

— Jess Walter

13. “The eye sees everything upside down,” the artist explained, “and then the brain automatically reverses it. I’m just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it.” Alvis.”

— Jess Walter

14. “On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children’s BMX bikes than in any other city in the world.”

— Jess Walter

15. “All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story!”

— Jess Walter

16. “He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.”

— Jess Walter

17. “Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief.”

— Jess Walter

18. “Maybe it’s ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you’re alive for a while, and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.”

— Jess Walter

19. “There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant – sail for Asia and stumble on America – and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.”

— Jess Walter

20. “Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in your own mind, their struggles and triumphs connecting to your own until a book becomes like a piece of music you’ve played – and sometimes mastered – over a period of days, or weeks.”

— Jess Walter

21. “I love humor in writing, so I’ve written to the thing that’s funny, there’s the joke, but then I just kept going. I started thinking about all the bikes I’ve had stolen, and that got me thinking about crime, and that got me thinking about the city I’m in.”

— Jess Walter

22. “Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.”

— Jess Walter

23. “Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.”

— Jess Walter

24. “He flushed with sadness, as if every moment of his life were occurring all at once – his sister dying in childbirth, his mother squirming in that one-room flop, poor Danny sliding between wet logs, Gig in jail, and Jules dead – and how many more? All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.”

— Jess Walter

25. “There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors.”

— Jess Walter

26. “You have to do disappointment twice.”

— Jess Walter

27. “Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith.”

— Jess Walter

28. “He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.”

— Jess Walter

29. “I’ve been a dad since I was nineteen, so I think a lot about fatherhood and the power of that sacrifice in your life.”

— Jess Walter

30. “And if a moment exists only in one’s perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow.”

— Jess Walter

31. “He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.”

— Jess Walter

32. “Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn’t be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.”

— Jess Walter

33. “I think suspense should be like any other color on a writers palette. I suppose Im in the minority but I think its crazy for literary fiction to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.”

— Jess Walter

34. “You take something from your past that you’re somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character’s point of view.”

— Jess Walter

35. “And if a moment exists only in one’s perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them.”

— Jess Walter

36. “Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we’re less alone.”

— Jess Walter

37. “I’m certainly eclectic in my writing.”

— Jess Walter

38. “Maybe it’s being close to the end, but I have this desire to pull Greg aside – to pull all my children aside, and my grandchildren – and to whisper something profound, to pass on the great wisdom I’ve acquired. Something that would open their hearts and create in them an unassailable courage, a generosity of spirit, faith in humanity.”

— Jess Walter

39. “I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, ‘second breakfast,’ or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can’t get to.”

— Jess Walter

40. “This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from the television sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen.”

— Jess Walter

41. “She saw death as just another wedding she wasn’t invited to.”

— Jess Walter

42. “The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.”

— Jess Walter

43. “I don’t know a family that isn’t touched by some sort of addiction.”

— Jess Walter

44. “He considered it a shame when people couldn’t grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.”

— Jess Walter

45. “If you come from money and you become an addict, you go to the Betty Ford Clinic, you get treatment. If you’re living on the street and you’re an addict, it’s much harder to find your way out.”

— Jess Walter

46. “The form is so malleable and can do so many things.”

— Jess Walter

47. “No one gets to tell you what your life means!”

— Jess Walter

48. “A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You have to do disappointment twice.”

— Jess Walter

49. “I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn’t send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I’d seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I’d mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.”

— Jess Walter

50. “The stories tend to be what I work on when I’m stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I’ll think that’s more of a story.”

— Jess Walter