Bob Shacochis Quotes

You're making a fantasy. You're making something real out of a fantasy. And then it no longer exists. It's heartbreaking to leave behind. I was devastated after Waiting for Guffman. I had never gotten so close to people I've worked with.

I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

When you're not hearing my voice, I'm working on art. So if you're not hearing me, I'm working for the people and getting inspired.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Some of my characters are a mixture of various aspects of people I have met. others are pure invention.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something.

I feel saddened when people who have major friendships or marriages wind up on the outs. Because I think you lose a little piece of yourself.

People are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

In some ways, you know, people that don't exist, are much nicer than people that do.

I am a storyteller from a personal viewpoint. When I run out of people I invent ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts. Never saw one.

I have a picture I keep in my wallet of my father's corpse... I keep that picture in my wallet to show people who show me baby pictures.

Whoa, I've really got to stop making plans with fictional characters. It can't be healthy to develop relationships with people who don't exist.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.

I didn't have a home in the world, so I wanted a home in a person. I felt like I had found that, and then it was taken away from me.

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.