Top 80 Jess Walter Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Stories are nations, empires.”

— Jess Walter

52. “All we have is the story we tell.”

— Jess Walter

53. “I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It’s easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.”

— Jess Walter

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exacting part, the action? It’s all so fast.”

— Jess Walter

58. “People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.”

— Jess Walter

59. “Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.”

— Jess Walter

60. “Because I’m a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It’s what inspires me and pushes me through.”

— Jess Walter

61. “Oh, the things she would say if she could – but it’s a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.”

— Jess Walter

62. “I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.”

— Jess Walter

63. “His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

— Jess Walter

64. “No, no, we are definitely writ on water. Or cognac – if we’ve any luck at all.”

— Jess Walter

65. “I think he came to believe it was better to choose your life, and that even choosing your death was better than letting someone else choose your life.”

— Jess Walter

66. “Caroline was struck by just how close twenty-four feet really is, how little space really exists between us. Of course they were different, Lenny Ryan’s shooting of the pawnbroker, her own shooting of the wife beater. But that meant there was a difference between what Lenny Ryan did and what Kevin Verloc did, that in the end we are separated not by distance, but degree. And in that truth was another; none of us knows, in the tumble of events, what she is capable of doing.”

— Jess Walter

67. “Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that’s okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn’t – and perhaps loses track of just where she is.”

— Jess Walter

68. “At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?”

— Jess Walter

69. “I realized the structure in a collection is how they’re put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.”

— Jess Walter

70. “You can’t just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It’s how people end up married.”

— Jess Walter

71. “Elena reminds him that without his dad’s union job, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head, but he’s one of those men of fragile confidence who needs to always believe that he’s made his own way in the world.”

— Jess Walter

72. “You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.”

— Jess Walter

73. “The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it’s how you teach yourself to write.”

— Jess Walter

74. “It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. 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

75. “I’m a professional. So before I published any novels, I’d always been writing stories.”

— Jess Walter

76. “At my age, you don’t cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, “Ah,” that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness – here is yet another person I will never see again.”

— Jess Walter

77. “People can handle an unjust world; it’s when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.”

— Jess Walter

78. “It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.”

— Jess Walter

79. “Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”

— Jess Walter

80. “But the only thing I can think of is Time and patience.”

— Jess Walter

81. “It’s quite a thing when the world is upside down to hear someone say it don’t have to be – that a man could be paid enough to feed and house himself.”

— Jess Walter

82. “Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!”

— Jess Walter

83. “The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don’t think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don’t think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.”

— Jess Walter

84. “Among the world’s evils – fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation – smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids’ school.”

— Jess Walter

85. “Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap – that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.”

— Jess Walter

86. “How do you do it?” I asked her. “How do you keep getting up every day and fighting when winning seems impossible?” She thought about it, and then she said, “Men sometimes say to me: You might win the battle, Gurley, but you’ll never win the war. But no one wins the war, Ryan. Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? “But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?”

— Jess Walter

87. “Books that hadn’t been cracked since they were shelved. Give money to a monkey and he’ll fill his cage with bananas. Give the same money to a dim American and he’ll build a show library every time.”

— Jess Walter

88. “I mean, who are you if you can’t make it up? Especially people like you and me. Are we just supposed to stay the shitheads our parents and high schools sent out into the world, the ones our classmates assumed would do nothing with our lives?”

— Jess Walter