Jon > Jon's Quotes

“Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.”
― Paul Auster

“The truth of the story lies in the details.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.”
― Paul Auster

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“My witness is the empty sky.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Houses are full of things that gather dust”
― Jack Kerouac

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”
― Isaac Babel

“The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—”
― John Ashbery

“The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it). . .”
― John Ashbery, Three Poems