James Purdy Quotes

He stood there, his eyes like they had been before. Their beauty stabbed at her heart like a great knife; the hair looked so like she had just pressed the wet comb to it and perhaps put a little pomade on the sides; and the small face was clean and sad. Yet her arms somehow did not ache to hold him like her heart told her they should. Something too far away and too strong was between her and him; she only saw him as she had always seen resurrection pictures, hidden from us as in a wonderful mist that will not let us see our love complete.

I have wrote my name in hell,” Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

He’s America in action — opposed to quality.

And yet Curt’s a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that’s all.

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.

Behind this story so far is another story, as behind the girders of an ancient bridge is the skeleton of a child which superstition says keeps the bridge standing.

My idea of heaven is to be hunting with you in some beautiful park with mountains like here at home but where we won’t need guns or prey but we will just walk together arm in arm in this good world and be by ourselves always together forever and a day.

If the book’s bad enough, they’ll publish it, and if it’s bad bad enough, the daily reviewers will love it, and it’ll sell.