Joe Eszterhas Quotes

You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

When I look back at the tapes, your first everything, your first All-Star Game, your first playoff experience, it just seems like it went by really fast.

I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.

When I look back at the 1980s I pinch myself. Did I really do all that?

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

The thing is I never want to be an observer, it's only in retrospect that I wish I had observed.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.

So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.