William Maxwell may refer to:
It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.
I am the cat that walks alone.
A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own.
It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.
The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. . . But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable.
My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.
A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.
My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.
Your reader is at least as bright as you are
What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.