Blake Nelson > Blake's Quotes

“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”
― William Faulkner

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
― John Updike

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Life is ridiculous. It's not our fault.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― John Updike

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”
― John Updike

“I watch Stewart. He has the most interesting face. It is beautiful, young, almost childlike, and yet with a power and authority in his features. In another time he would have been a young warrior, a Lost Prince exiled from his kingdom. But he's from this time, this place, so he's just some "at risk" kid who can't find a place for himself in the straight world.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“But I think Cybil was my biggest fan. She cut out my articles and hung them in her locker and we were always cracking up how if you wrote the simplest, most obvious thing in the world people thought you were a genius.”
― Blake Nelson, Girl

“It's hard to imagine talking to Lucy. But I can imagine sleeping with her. I have been imagining it quite regularly. I can't stop imagining it. Maybe it's time for my first Lucy Branch, my first truly physical relationship. And why do I assume it would be a bad thing? Maybe it's better with someone different from you. I could teach her how fluorocarbons affect the ozone. She could teach me about oral sex.

We would both become better people.”
― Blake Nelson, Destroy All Cars

“Do you ever think about the ocean?" Nick asked me.
"What about it?" I said.
"Like what could live down there? Like how there's as much life down there as up here? Maybe more?"
"God Lives Underwater," said someone. "That's the name of a band. They're awesome."
"But seriously," Nick said, "it's like an alternate universe. Right here on our own planet."
"Right here, a hundred feet from us," said Sheila.
"Right here in my hair," said one of the girls who had swum, pulling some sea gunk out of her wet hair.
Everyone laughed quietly at that. Nick drank his beer. The wood crackled as it burned. We all stared at the black ocean.”
― Blake Nelson, They Came from Below

“He holds me. I am his in a way he probably isn't even aware of.
Boys shouldn't know what power they have. They would panic probably or just mess things up. But boys are who you give yourself to. Not your parents or your teachers or your "future". You give yourself to a boy.
And then you go for long walks at night and think about them and wonder what they will do to you in the end.”
― Blake Nelson

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else.”
― Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“...that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“On Friday night, my dad wants to have a family activity. so we go ice-skating. It's me and my mom and my dad and my sister. It's like we're all together. It's like a beautiful dream. It's like the Disney Channel. Except that my dad and I hate each other. And my mom hates herself. And my sister is humiliated by the bunch of us. And I'm secretly waiting for the inevitable devastation of our entire civilization. But except for that.”
― Blake Nelson, Destroy All Cars

“I like if you're reading something, and they're saying something you always thought, but they're putting it in the exact right way”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“It's like we've entered a separate reality. Like now it's just the two of us, nothing else matters, no one exists.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“Guys are like buses [...] Why get on the first one you see, when there’s another one coming right after? Or something like that. Or maybe it’s the opposite. I heard that on Oprah.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“Those people who look so together. They’re as insecure as anyone. Maybe more so. You’re as smart as any of them.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“Boys shouldn’t know what power they have. They would panic probably, or just mess things up. But boys are who you give yourself to. Not your parents, or your teachers, or your “future.” You give yourself to a boy.

And then you go for long walks at night and think about them and wonder what they will do to you in the end.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“This is where I want to be now, alone with myself. Because I know that something has happened to me tonight, something that I’m not going to understand at first, something I need to just absorb and think about and get used to.

This is going to be hard for me. I can’t control this. I can’t stop what it will do to me.

But I want it. I want to be inside it, to feel it, forever.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road

“But I let myself love him anyway. I let myself love him with all my heart. I give myself that. I tell myself I deserve it.”
― Blake Nelson, Recovery Road