Ron Carlson Quotations

I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.

The men and women, the weapons, the deerhunt all make a huge and fragile danger in John Bolger's novel The Hunters. There is care and harm in this book and all written with felicitous and steady grace.

I always write about my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

The writer is the person who stays in the room.

Get down, get naked, get savage.

Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon.

It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science.