Let’s get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray’s dazzling new novel, ‘Skippy Dies,’… Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Jess Walter Read Quote
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer’s palette. I suppose I’m in the minority but I think it’s crazy for ‘literary fiction’ to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto. Jess Walter Read Quote
I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: ‘It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.’ Jess Walter Read Quote
My poems… the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes. Jess Walter Read Quote
I don’t know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don’t think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I’m deep in a novel, I don’t pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names. Jess Walter Read Quote
My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I’ve turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house. Jess Walter Read Quote
My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out. Jess Walter Read Quote
In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and immediately fell in love. Jess Walter Read Quote
I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo – we’re more arch than that. We’re our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately. Jess Walter Read Quote
I wake at 5 or 5:30 most mornings, make myself a latte and grab a cookie, write until 10 or 11, go have my favorite meal, ‘second breakfast,’ or grab coffee with friends, or play basketball. Then, around noon, I begin apologizing via email for the manuscripts I can’t get to. Jess Walter Read Quote
