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Richard Yates

99 quotes

• “One advantage of the very low lighting in this room, he'd decided, was that it could make almost any girl look like a million dollars.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Yeah, well, you're right, but what the hell; there's nothing anybody can do about it. Besides, that's ancient history now. I don't even think about it much any more, from - you know - from day to day." "Good," she said. "It's always important to keep the day-to-day stuff separate from the ancient history, isn't it.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Story: "Jody rolled the bones". (p.35-36 in Collected Short Stories) [Page numbers per the Vintage 2008 edition of 'Collected Short Stories', which includes the stories in 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness']

• “Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then they came out, Finney wearing the foolish smile you sometimes see in the crowds that gape at street accidents”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Being told he was right was always a tonic to Ken”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Where are the windows?" he demanded, spreading his hands. "That's the question. Where does the light come in?”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But late that night, as Irving Berlin himself might say, something kind of wonderful happened. I took that little bastard of a story and I built the hell out of it.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “She too was a divorced mother, though her former husband had vanished long ago and was referred to only as "that bastard" or "that cowardly son of a bitch".”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Story: "Oh Joseph, I'm so tired". (p.181-182 in Collected Short Stories) [Page numbers per the Vintage 2008 edition of 'Collected Short Stories', which includes the stories in 'Liars in Love']

• “Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York - more people than you can possibly imagine, ever - and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed - and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint - so very, very faint - that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “then he came back and faced her again, trembling. "'Nice,'" he said. "'Nice,' Is that what you want? You want the world to be 'nice'? Because listen, baby. Listen, sweetheart. The world is about as nice as shit. The world is struggle and rape and humilation and death. The world is no fucking place for dreamy little rich girls from St. Louis, do you understand me?”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “if self-deception was an illness she was well into its advanced stages.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Oh," Colby said. "I see." " What d'you see? You really aren't much of a conversationalist, you know that? You 'see', What can you possibly 'see' from what little I've told you?”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then he turned his chair away from his drawing board - he didn't often do that - and sat looking grave and thoughtful, examining the wet end of his cigar. "Well, hell, I'd like to get married too," he said. "I mean, I'm not really immune to it or anything, but there are a few obstacles. Number one, I haven't met the right girl. Number two, I've got too many other responsibilities. Number three - or wait, come to think of it, who the hell needs a number three?”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It occurred to Jack that if he held the phone well away from his head Sally's voice would dwindle and flatten out and be lost in tinny gibberish, like the voice of an idiot midget.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937-39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough [i.e. Stephen Benedict], whose amateur theatre group ("The Beechwood Players") served as the original for "The Laurel Players" in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: "Revolutionary Road".”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Part of a 1961 letter by Richard Yates, quoted by Blake Bailey in Chapter 1 at p.33. [The described road can indeed be found if one Googles it.]

• “Aspirando et perseverando was and is the Avon Old Farms school motto”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 2, "A good school: 1939-1944", at p.46

• “He wrote almost every word of [ Avon Old Farms school's ] newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. "Dick ran everything of a literary nature," said classmate Gilman Ordway. "He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 2, "A good school: 1939-1944", at p.59

• “Keep a tight asshole" became a favourite motto in times of adversity.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 3, "The Canal: 1944-1947", at p.81

• “This tendency to become deeply attached to unlikely people would remain one of [Yates's] most poignant and self-destructive qualities.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 3, "The Canal: 1944-1947", at p.87

• “But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates The Great Gatsby was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definite milestone of his apprenticeship: Gatsby, Yates declared, was "his formal introduction to the craft." Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates's early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in Nine Stories.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 4, "Liars in love: 1947-1951", at p.108-109, 109-110

• “twelve years [after short story "Jody Rolled the Bones" was published] [Yates] got [a letter] from Colonel Roger Little of the Office of Military Psychology and Leadership: "Jody", wrote Little, had long been used "as a reference . . . because it is such a sensitive portrayal of the basic trainee's perception of the noncommissioned officer.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 5, "The getaway: 1951-1953", at p.135

• “Charlie was Charlie: possessed of "an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people's weaknesses," as Yates put it. Footnote by Blake Bailey: The quote is taken from the 1972 Ploughshares interview. Yates was explaining how his brother-in-law's personality was similar to that of John Givings in "Revolutionary Road".”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 6, "A cry to prisoners: 1953-1959", at p.171

• “I had read [ Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] before but hadn't studied it the way I'd studied Gatsby and other books; now it seemed ideally suited to serve as a guide, if not a model, for the novel that was taking shape in my mind. I wanted that kind of balance and quiet resonance on every page, that kind of foreboding mixed with comedy, that kind of inexorable destiny in the heart of a lonely, romantic girl. And all of it, of course, would have to be done with an F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of freshness and grace.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Yates writing in "Some Very Good Masters" (essay). Quoted in Chapter 6, "A cry of prisoners: 1953-1959", at p.175

• “Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the "objective correlative"—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without labouring the point.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 6, "A cry of prisoners: 1953-1959", at p.175. (This remark is by Blake Bailey)

• “Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary, [Yates] wrote, "is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 6, "A cry of prisoners: 1953-1959", at p.176

• “It took me a long time to figure out... that the best way to handle [the couple's dialogue] was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication." In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away".”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Richard Yates, about writing Revolutionary Road (Ploughshares, 68); plus an observation by Blake Bailey on this. Chapter 6, "A cry of prisoners: 1953-1959", at p.178

• “Revolutionary Road, no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 7, "A glutton for punishment: 1959-1961", at p.231

• “The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 8, "The world on fire: 1961-1962", at p.243, about Richard Yates.

• “In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over "the desolate wastes of time" that had diminished his productivity.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 14, "Disturbing the Peace: 1974-1976", at p.437

• “Nor did he bother to get out much.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 14, "Disturbing the Peace: 1974-1976", at p.439

• “Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters [...] because "they can't help being the people they are" —Yates's explicit vision of tragedy.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 15, "Out with the old: 1976-1978", at p.467. (Concerning the novel The Easter Parade)

• “Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 15, "Out with the old: 1976-1978", at p.480

• “these lives don't seem worth the trouble he has given them.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 16, "Young Hearts Crying: 1979-1984", at p.507. Part of a remark by Roger Angell for The New Yorker yet again rejecting a short story of Yates's. [This seems to be a criticism that could be levelled in respect o…

• “All of this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. "Why aren't you writing?" he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), "Why aren't you revising this? You should be constantly revising!" Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: "How could I improve it? he'd fire back [...] Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realise that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 18, "A cheer for realised men: 1988-1992", at p.585

• “At the time of [Richard Yates's] death the novel [Uncertain Times] was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 18, "A cheer for realised men: 1988-1992", at p.594

• “On December 16, 1992, Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut hosted a memorial service for Yates at the Century Club in Manhattan. In his eulogy Vonnegut spoke of the "forced march" he'd made through all nine of Yates's books before preparing his remarks: "Not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence and clarity.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 18, "A cheer for realised men: 1988-1992", at p.606

• “How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The question of whether or not she would find it awkward being called "Mrs Nelson" remained unresolved; nobody in Scarsdale called her anything at all. Electric trains drew the men away to the city each morning and the children were swallowed up by the school. The women, alone in their big, impeccable houses, let their days slip away in endless rounds of triviality - or at least, that was the way Alice saw them in her mind's eye. She pictured them idling through easy household chores or giving instructions to their maids, and painting their fingernails and fixing their hair and compounding their lassitude by spending hours on the telephone with one another, talking of bridge clubs and luncheons and functions of the P.T.A. If their lives included anything more interesting than that she didn't learn of it, for none of them ever called her up or dropped in for a neighbourly visit - nor, apparently, did any of their husbands ever strike up an acquaintance with Sterling on the train. Scarsdale behaved as though Alice and Sterling didn't exist.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He couldn't help pondering how he would feel if his own father were to die. It was unthinkable: Jock MacKenzie was in the very prime of life, a laughing, sailing, golf- and tennis-playing man who could still defeat his son at arm-wrestling any time he felt like it, and often did. Still, there were heart attacks; there were strokes; there was cancer. Nobody lived forever. Jock MacKenzie's anger could be terrible, but in his gentle moods there was no finer companion in the world. Every worthwhile thing Steve knew, it seemed, was something he had learned from his father. As a condition of receiving a car on his sixteenth birthday, Steve had been made to memorise the whole of Kipling's "If", which later helped him earn the only "A" he'd ever had in Pop Driscoll's course; and certain lines of that poem, remembered now as they sounded in his father's voice , were enough to fill his eyes with tears. This Sunday, he promised himself, he would call home and have a good long talk with the old man. "When you're talking, Steve", Jock MacKenzie had told him once, "and I don't care who it's to or what it's about, the important thing is knowing when to stop. Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: p.85, 86 (Ch.4) [Page numbers per the 2007 Vintage paperback edition]

• “Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that's sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it's this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there's nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewellery wholesalers. There isn't any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you're out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that's a disappointment because you've seen it all in photographs so many times. Right? So I don't know; I think Phil and I'd better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As [Richard Yates] explained in a 1972 interview, his characters "all rush around trying to do their best—trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are. That's what brings on the calamity at the end." Yates's compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work [...]. Yates also tended to be hard on characters based on himself. But all are worthy of our sympathy in at least one respect: They try to do their best but fail because of limitations over which they have no control.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates", by Blake Bailey (2003) - from Chapter 1, "The Caliche Road: 1926-1939", at p.17 [Page numbers per the 2006 Methuen UK edition.]

• “I've also discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my "broods" do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness . . . I've pulled myself out of [several really major broods since you left] by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I'm not saying I've overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I'm holding my own against the bastards. They don't immobilize me any more, and I'm confident it won't be long before I'll be able to brush them off like flies. Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who "rush around trying to do their best . . . doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Extract from a 1953 letter by Richard Yates (then living in a basement flat in London, to write) to his first wife Sheila (who had by then gone back with their infant daughter to the USA); plus a comment by Blake Bailey…

• “Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate, nor write coherent English cornered me to demand, frankly, whether I thought she Had Talent. Tried to evade the question for twenty minutes, and ended up saying sure. Depressing experience.... [I've] pretty well decided that teaching does sap the old creative energy after all. Why do so many sad clowns want to be writers? It's hard, no fun, scrambles your brains and leaves you unfit for practically all other kinds of human activity. Apart from which there's no dough in it except for Leon Uris and Allen Drury.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 8, "The world on fire: 1961-1962", at p.257. Yates, here, despondent about teaching. From a letter to Barbara Beury, 26 June 1961.

• “Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were "too nice": "See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.' Think about them, and the hell with the reader's sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do." Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 17, "No pain whatsoever: 1985-1988", at p.551

• “Yates viewed Gloria [Cold Spring Harbor] as the best likeness of Dookie [his own real-life mother] he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader's sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, "the hell with the reader's sympathies". Which, in a nutshell, may explain why Cold Spring Harbor didn't sell and why, for that matter, Yates's books [kept] going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later. [...] If Yates seemed to vacillate between "acceptance and revulsion" towards his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis.”

  Richard Yates (1926–1992) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Chapter 17, "No pain whatsoever: 1985-1988", at p.553