Richard Yates Quotes

It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?

if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?

Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.

Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.

People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.

...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.

Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg--'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it?

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.

God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?

With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.

I seem to have to lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense.