Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Quotes

“The hardest part of dreaming is that if you don’t do it, nothing terrible happens. Life goes on. This is why crying babies and student loans always take precedence; if you don’t see to those matters, things explode, break down, civilization stops being civilized. But if you never cut that album you always wanted to record, what happens? What worlds come crashing down, but the one in your heart? None.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“For most of human history, these children's career options would have been much simpler, back when you did whatever your parents did, which was usually to die of typhoid.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Nobody tells you that on any given day when you are to appear at a bookstore or festival, a surprising number of all your friends in that town will message you that regrettably they are unable to attend because a family emergency requires their attention. Many of them have to leave town for a family funeral, they will say. Everywhere you go, people die, it seems.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“I tried church [to meet guys],' she said.
'I bet you hate it.'
'I do.'
I couldn't argue with that. Churches can be frightening places, full of friendly old people.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“That same weekend in Memphis, I stayed with my older half sister, Tanya. We share a father, but not a childhood. She was not in the book.

One of her greatest accomplishments happened when I was ten and she was seventeen and called our father to tell him she had just married a man who was twenty-seven, a world record. He put the phone down, and quietly explained to my mother what Tanya had done, and then he sat there in the recliner and stared out the window like a man who'd learned exactly what he'd just learned.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Twice a year, they [the publisher] send you a bill for exactly how much money your book has not made and thus how much you owe them from the money they paid you. If you don't earn back your advance, then you probably don't get a paperback and most definitely probably do not get a second book with anyone, anywhere, because there's this secret database, housed somewhere in a mountain in coal country, which records book sales for everyone in the industry to see, so said Debbie, who revealed all this to me slowly, over several months, because if she told me all at once I might have lost consciousness.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Is a mother excited the baby's going to come out? Yes, yes, of course, so she can take a bath in a vat of gin.”
― harrison scott key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“I tried to explain [to my parents] that HarperCollins was the publisher of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the most popular book of the nineteenth century, a book that started a war, according to President Lincoln. Would my book start a war? Fingers crossed!”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Everybody buys books by famous people, especially if the famous people write the book themselves, because these famous people . . . have what's called a 'platform' from which to say things, while most of us are down with the groundlings.”
― harrison scott key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“[Re.: book blurbs:] It feels weird, asking people to say nice things about you so you can tell others what they said, like airbrushing compliments you've received on a T-shirt and then wearing that shirt to a job interview, which is actually not a bad idea.”
― harrison scott key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“While finishing the proposal, Debbie also made me commit additional acts of perversion, such as sending letters to famous people asking for blurbs to put in the proposal.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“The good news was, there is much fine literature to draw from in the American South, many inspiring works, like 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy' by the esteemed agrarian poet, Kenneth Chesney.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“That summer, I sat down and wrote a brochure for an imaginary book about my father, which was turning out in my head to feel like a book about the South, which was a little worrying. Write a funny book about the South and the next thing you know they're making you do a ribbon cutting at a new Cracker Barrel and inviting you to speak at the Dukes of Hazzard Museum.”
― harrison scott key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Next, Debbie made me write a proposal, which is a very long brochure for a book that doesn't even exist, where you have to say ridiculous things like: Not since [name of really successful book from a few years ago that everybody remembers and which was made into a film] has a [name of genre] so [adverb + verb] the experience of [nominative phrase].

For example: Not since Alan Jackson's 'Book of Fancy Hatbands' has a memoir so fully explored the experience of having a mustache.”
― harrison scott key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“So much of daily life comprises mostly of harmless posturing. We must pretend to be more amazing than we are . . . we spend much of our day lying . . . Art undoes all that. Art is an exercise in not lying, for once.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“I wanted to share the new [written] work with my wife, but decided not to, as she was pregnant and now generally only answered questions about nachos.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“My salary increased from $30,000 per year to $50,000, which, after taxes and student loan and car payments, came to forty dollars.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“Back in my day, before children were encouraged to send pictures of their genitalia to one another via small handheld computers, we actually took the time to get real paper and draw pictures of our genitalia by hand, which we then mailed to one another via a system of wagon trains.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“As a schoolboy, I demonstrated no special gifts or talents, aside from running my mouth in class, in the back of the room, in the direction of whichever young lady was trying hardest to ignore me. When talking would not pick the lock of adoration, I turned to the composition of amorous messages on notebook paper, which I then folded and handed to girls in my class, in hopes that they would allow me to lick their faces, however that worked. I had seen this licking on television and thought it looked interesting.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“What is a dream?

According to Cinderella, 'A dream is a wish your heart makes.'

It is instructive to note that our hero sings these words to a family of birds who wear kerchiefs and don't appear to have the power of language, revealing the first important thing you need to know about dreamers, which is, most of them need psychiatric evaluation.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

“I found myself at a conference at the University of Mississippi, where I read a story for a large audience, and they laughed, the way I had always dreamt of making people laugh. Immediately upon my reading the last line, the audience applauded vigorously, and I felt that perhaps I could go ahead and die, this was it, I had done it, melted brains in my homeland”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?