Robert Boswell Quotes

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

- Robert Boswell

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

- Robert Boswell

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

- Robert Boswell

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

- Robert Boswell

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

- Robert Boswell

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

- Robert Boswell

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

- Robert Boswell