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Top 8 Robert Olen Butler Quotes (2026 Update)

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “All plot comes from the character’s trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.”

1. “All plot comes from the character’s trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.”

2. “Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.”

3. “The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that’s the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “We are the yearning creatures of this planet.”

4. “We are the yearning creatures of this planet.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.”

5. “The ironic humor comes from the distance between what we understand about ourselves and what is truly going on in ourselves.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.”

6. “I can speak these words and perhaps you can see these things clearly because you are using your imagination. But I cannot imagine these things because I lived them, and to remember them with the vividness I know they should have is impossible. They are lost to me.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you’re less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it’s technique, you think about it. If it’s your socks, it’s not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that’s what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.”

7. “I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you’re less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it’s technique, you think about it. If it’s your socks, it’s not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that’s what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.”

— Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler Quote: “I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life – a book I love – and one of the students said, “It’s so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.”

8. “I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life – a book I love – and one of the students said, “It’s so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.”

— Robert Olen Butler

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