Jess Walter Quotes

Welcome to the world of Jess Walter, where words dance off the page and into the depths of your soul. Jess Walter is an American author known for his captivating storytelling and poignant insights into the human condition. With a masterful command of language, Walter weaves tales that resonate with readers long after they’ve turned the final page. His works span various genres, from literary fiction to crime thrillers, each offering a unique perspective on life, love, and the complexities of existence.

Throughout his illustrious career, Jess Walter has gifted readers with an abundance of memorable lines that capture the essence of his narratives and the depth of his characters. From profound reflections on the passage of time to witty observations on modern society, Walter’s quotes have the power to inspire, provoke thought, and evoke emotion. Below, you’ll find a collection of Jess Walter’s most compelling quotes, ready to be embraced, shared, and cherished. Let these words serve as a beacon of wisdom and inspiration as you navigate the intricacies of life’s journey.

I don’t know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don’t think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I’m deep in a novel, I don’t pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names. Jess Walter

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay – these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists. Jess Walter

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I’d say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love. Jess Walter

There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors. Jess Walter

I doubt the terrorists saw 9/11 as a teaching opportunity. And we’re not really a culture geared to anything as humble as ‘learning.’ But I was disappointed in how quickly everyone wanted to get back to normal. It was as if we watched terrorism on TV for a while, then got bored and turned back to ‘American Idol.’ Jess Walter

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

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

I teach in M.F.A. programs now, and I think that’s a great way to become a novelist, but I mourn that Pete Dexter and Joan Didion’s route is maybe less likely because there are fewer of those jobs. I always liken it to playing piano in some great dive jazz bar. You didn’t pick the songs, you played what people asked for, but you got your chops. Jess Walter

I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo – we’re more arch than that. We’re our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately. Jess Walter

With Facebook and Twitter, we’re all our own little publicists in a way. Jess Walter

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I’m attuned to current events. Jess Walter

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don’t think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints. Jess Walter

There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there. Jess Walter

My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I’ve turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house. Jess Walter

I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: ‘It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.’ Jess Walter

I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel. Jess Walter

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and immediately fell in love. Jess Walter

Ultimately if you’re a journalist, one day you’re writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world. Jess Walter

I’m a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself. Jess Walter

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I’m a writer… I write poetry and essays and criticism and I’d love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. Jess Walter

I probably would have gone the M.F.A. route except I was a dad at 19, and it made more sense to go to work for a newspaper and support a kid that way. But the funny thing is, that detour became the most important step in my developing as a novelist. Jess Walter

My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out. Jess Walter

Let’s get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray’s dazzling new novel, ‘Skippy Dies,’… Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Jess Walter

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer’s palette. I suppose I’m in the minority but I think it’s 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

Forget being ‘discovered.’ All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it’s a struggle. A gorgeous struggle. Jess Walter

Often, the fact that I haven’t done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it. Jess Walter

I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift… you don’t have to look too far in history to see that’s just not the case. Jess Walter

My poems… the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes. Jess Walter

I think most Hollywood meetings are silly and I truly despise pitching. It’s insane to expect someone to come in and tell you the story before they’ve written it, and buying an idea from someone who can explain it rather than write it is like choosing a mechanic based on his ability to draw a picture of your car’s problem. Jess Walter

My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I’ve dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing ‘Citizen Vince’ as a film, and most recently, adapted ‘The Financial Lives of the Poets’ as a script. Jess Walter

I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I’m having trouble with the novel I’m writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer’s block by always writing something. Jess Walter

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well. Jess Walter

There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy. Jess Walter

My cure for writer’s block is to step away from the thing I’m stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It’s usually not the writing itself that I’m stuck on, but thing I’m trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once. Jess Walter

I’ve been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years. Jess Walter

I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There’s a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves. Jess Walter

Anton Usov
Anton Usov
I am Anton Usov, an educator with a passion for quotes that resonate with the human experience. Over many years, I have curated a collection that reflects wisdom and emotions across time. Join me in exploring the power of words to inspire and enlighten our paths.
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