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Padgett Powell Quotes


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Quotes by Padgett Powell

Showing 21-30 of 31 Quotes by Padgett Powell

I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.

~Padgett Powell

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They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.

~Padgett Powell

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I was a commercial roofer before this, until about age thirty. I will not work others under me and do not want to work under others.

~Padgett Powell

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I sat down and wrote, 'Are your emotions pure? Are they the stuff of heroes or the alloyed mess of the beaten? How do you stand in relation to the potato?' And it was a lot of fun, and I kept going and woke up at some point in some horror that I had about 142 pages of this.

~Padgett Powell

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As a boy, I was a member of a club run by the famous reptile showman Ross Allen, and the club sent its members pseudoscientific papers mimeographed on construction paper with a three-hole punch.

~Padgett Powell

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Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.

~Padgett Powell

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I know about the sweet home. I went to school with 'em boys, what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.

~Padgett Powell

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Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

~Padgett Powell

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Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.

~Padgett Powell

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I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.

~Padgett Powell

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Novelist

Born: April 25th, 1952

Links

Find Padgett Powell on Amazon

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