Top 90 Richard Yates Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.”

— Richard Yates

2. “No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”

— Richard Yates

3. “It takes backbone to lead the life you want.”

— Richard Yates

4. “Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.”

— Richard Yates

5. “Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.”

— Richard Yates

6. “Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

— Richard Yates

7. “Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.”

— Richard Yates

8. “You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

— Richard Yates

9. “It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”

— Richard Yates

10. “Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”

— Richard Yates

11. “The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.”

— Richard Yates

12. “Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?”

— Richard Yates

13. “I’m only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”

— Richard Yates

14. “Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.”

— Richard Yates

15. “You’re painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.”

— Richard Yates

16. “Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.”

— Richard Yates

17. “People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...”

— Richard Yates

18. “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

— Richard Yates

19. “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in.”

— Richard Yates

20. “And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

— Richard Yates

21. “A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.”

— Richard Yates

22. “I grandi libri, come i grandi amici, devono essere condivisi.”

— Richard Yates

23. “With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.”

— Richard Yates

24. “Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”

— Richard Yates

25. “Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other’s weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other’s strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.”

— Richard Yates

26. “Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents – it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.”

— Richard Yates

27. “She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?”

— Richard Yates

28. “He couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”

— Richard Yates

29. “There’s never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.”

— Richard Yates

30. “When you’re talking, Steve,” Jock MacKenzie had told him once, “and I don’t care who it’s to or what it’s about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn’t improve on silence.”

— Richard Yates

31. “He had won but he didn’t feel like a winner.”

— Richard Yates

32. “He was happy enough to stay in this jumbled, lively place where the drinks were cheap and the band was loud and he could feel the inner peace that comes from knowing that all your clothes are new and perfectly fitted.”

— Richard Yates

33. “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up.”

— Richard Yates

34. “God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.”

— Richard Yates

35. “I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I’ve come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.”

— Richard Yates

36. “He’s been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he’s come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he’s an art bum...”

— Richard Yates

37. “The gathering disorder of their lives might still be sorted out and made to fit these rooms.”

— Richard Yates

38. “But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long – not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved.”

— Richard Yates

39. “For a year she found an exquisite pain – almost pleasure – in facing the world as if she didn’t care. Look at me, she would say to herself in the middle of a trying day. Look at me: I’m surviving; I’m coping; I’m in control of all this.”

— Richard Yates

40. “Appalled at his own voice, he wondered why he couldn’t have said he was a social worker or a hospital executive. Would the kids have cared? Why was he spilling his guts instead? Did he think it might make him more interesting in Epstein’s eyes? But what was “interesting” about having been a mental patient? “ – anyway, I was locked up there,” he concluded, and he wondered if Pamela and the others were embarrassed for him.”

— Richard Yates

41. “Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like “x numbers of dollars”. At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said “x number of dollars” three times.”

— Richard Yates

42. “With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people.”

— Richard Yates

43. “And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear...”

— Richard Yates

44. “If you haven’t written a novel by the time you’re forty you never will!”

— Richard Yates

45. “I’m sure it’s probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?”

— Richard Yates

46. “He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I’ll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation.”

— Richard Yates

47. “She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down.”

— Richard Yates

48. “He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn’t mean there’d be any way to keep from knowing it was there.”

— Richard Yates

49. “On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song.”

— Richard Yates

50. “She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.”

— Richard Yates