Jess Walter Quotes

A lot of people don't realize that not everybody gets high.

I wrote about drugs, and I didn't think I was being unsafe or careless by writing about them. I didn't want fans to think heroin was cool. But then I've had fans come up to me and give me the thumbs up, telling me they're high. That's exactly what I didn't want to happen.

It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

Of course drugs were fun.

Many people go into the wilderness to experience it, and if they experience it in comfort, there's very little in a literary sense for them to write about.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

As someone who writes novels that are often set in other periods of time or other ages or other landscapes, there's a certain element of research I have to do, and often, the more laconic people are, the more interesting they become.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

I can't believe when you write something from within, how many people relate to it.

People always try to palm me weed when I'm always talking about how I don't smoke weed. But they always try to ... and when they stop offering me weed, then I'm going to feel kind of out of touch, like: "What did I do wrong that you won't offer me drugs that I don't do?" Because I'll trade those drugs out for drugs that I do do.

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It's as psychological as malaria. It's a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them.

I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

It's okay to get stoned, as long as its not by other people.

People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.

I didn't want to just write stories that were entertaining. Nor did I want to be so scholarly that people couldn't digest it.

If more people were stoned there would be less violence in the world.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

You have to get inside the people you are writing about. You have to go below the surface. And that's to a very large degree what all writers are doing - they're trying to get below the surface. Whether it's in fiction or poetry or writing history and biography. Some people make that possible because they write wonderful letters and diaries. And you have to sort of go where the material is.

In school, writing was the only thing that really came naturally to me, but it wasn't until college that I realized that I could do it for more than just fun.

I don't know if I've ever written anything that's not a bill! I do write stories but I don't put a stamp on them. I wrote a story for my wife over Christmas and gave it to her as a present because she asked me to, but I don't put a stamp on things and send them to people.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

People write a lot of similar material. That's why I try to come up with the most absurd jokes.

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers don't have to write novels anymore.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.