Peter Orner Quotes

Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.

I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?

I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.

My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets.

I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.

Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totally fascinated with.

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.

I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.

I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.

I think some writers should wait for something to say.

I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment.

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding a place but the soul of its people.

I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.