Carolyn See Quotes

I try to write in the morning when I’m working on a novel. You get up, you have breakfast, you read the paper, you make a couple of phone calls, and then you sit on the couch and start. I use felt pen and white notepaper.

‘The Talk-Funny Girl’ opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.

‘A Long Way Gone’ says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

You don’t want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life.

It was in ‘Esquire’ in the 1970s that I first learned Nora Ephron’s recipe for borscht – certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine.

I don’t believe you can buy or sell ‘cool.’

I’d never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn’t think a book with the name ‘Snakewoman of Little Egypt’ would hold any appeal for me at all.

Very much as men project weird fantasies on women, the people in New York project weird fantasies on California.

It’s my experience that you first feel the impulse to write in your chest. It’s like falling in love, only more so. It feels like something criminal. It feels like unspeakably wild sex. So, think: When you feel the overpowering need to go out and find some unspeakably wild sex, do you rush to tell your mom about it?

I’ve been at the very bottom of poverty, and it’s not so bad. It’s even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.

Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting.

I don’t think you think of your audience as much as you think, when you’re revising, how it holds together. I mean I think the first draft is art, and the second draft, third, fourth draft is craft. Putting it together so that it has a good pattern.

I don’t think I’m interested in writing women’s novels anymore.

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

‘Gillespie and I’ is a deliciously morbid, almost smutty story, a compendium of inappropriate wants and smarmy desires.

A great novelist must open the reader’s heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory — and shame and shabbiness — of what it is to be human.

There’s a saying that when you go on traveling tours, you get to know whom the designated jerk is going to be within three days, and if you don’t know it by then, you’re the jerk.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

I figure 1000 words a day, or four pages, and sometimes I’ll write more, but I’ll try not to. Because I think you don’t want to exhaust what it is you’re writing about, so the next day you would have to gear up for a brand new scene.