Daniel Woodrell Quotes

No matter what set she's been on over the last 12 years, my mother always finds a way to get in the way. Not in a bad way. Like, she once got caught on a law show I did called 'Philly' trying to take a picture - she was caught on-camera in the background. She does things like this.

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.

Resistance cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. We experince it as an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential... Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.

I guess it's good in a sense that it stops any of it from happening, but now you're telling me if it's Game 7 of the NBA Finals and a guy has a chance to make a play he's going to be like, 'Well, do I want this $10,000 or do I want a championship?'

But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.

I’ve blamed her for all of this, for leaving, for ruining me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it.I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.

An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.

When I'm in office I always keep Members of Parliament talking. If they stopped they might start thinking.

Busy people are never busybodies.

You think you're in a place where you're all 'I'm thrilled to be gay, I have no issues about being gay anymore, I don't feel shame about being gay,' but you actually do. You're just not fully aware of it. I think I still felt scared about people knowing. I felt awkward around gay people; I felt guilty for not being myself.

A vile imagination, once indulged, gets the key of our minds, and can get in again very easily, whether we will or no, and can so return as to bring seven other spirits with it more wicked than itself; and what may follow no one knows.

The crisis is not out there in the world, it is within our own consciousness.

I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.

I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

It is better to be fully present and rested and engaged for one thing than rushed, distracted, and scattered for ten.

After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.

[On lightweight movies:] Fun movies. They were never meant to cure cancer, only to take away the mind.

The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can't get out of within.

There is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.