Best 9 quotes of William Kennedy on MyQuotes

Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.