Robert Boswell Quotes

“Americans were no more shallow than any other people, just more pampered, so they had come to treasure their shallowness, making pop singers and television actors their most revered leaders. Pampered but lovable. He loved America, even though he held it in contempt. Love and contempt were not incompatible. In fact, one was rarely found without the other.”

— Robert Boswell

Once this person this counselor at school, this LADY, if you know what I mean, told me that if you kept your nose to the grindstone you could be someone in the world, and I thought, Yeah someone with a fucked up nose.

— Robert Boswell

“The rain began to fall harder, and it distracted him, but he tried to pull himself back because he felt on the verge of understanding something large and important. It seemed to him that this moment-the light and wind, the sweep of fields, the falling rain, the lowing cows, Leah's form as it twisted to one side and then another-captured a sort of life that he longed for, a life of order and harsh beauty, and although this was his farm and his vision, it did not seem to be his life. It seemed instead to be the thing for which he must daily give up his life, an act of submission to something he could not name and only rarely, in moments such as these, have a sense of. Life during these moments seemed neither lost nor ruined but a power to be shared, as the grass shares its power with the living things that devour it.”

— Robert Boswell

“The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way.”

— Robert Boswell

“Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.”

— Robert Boswell

“What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?”

— Robert Boswell

Ideology is the light that creates darkness.

— Robert Boswell

“I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.”

— Robert Boswell

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

— Robert Boswell

“Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.”

— Robert Boswell

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

— Robert Boswell

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

— Robert Boswell

“You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.”

— Robert Boswell

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

— Robert Boswell

“Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.”

— Robert Boswell

“Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.”

— Robert Boswell