Robert Olen Butler Quotes

Story is a yearning meeting an obstacle.

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.

The only craft and technique you have legitimate access to is the craft and technique you forgot, that has dissolved itself into the unconscious... Because you have learned it so well you have forgotten it.

All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.

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

Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily the appropriate form for the way they see the world... if, in fact, they are writing from the artist's impulse, which is a deep, inchoate vision of some sort of order behind the apparent chaos of life on planet earth, they'll be driven then to express that vision in the creation of the object - the art object.

We are the yearning creatures of this planet.

In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart.

Jayne Anne Phillips . . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.