Quotes by John Hawkes

• When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
• My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
• It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.
• In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.
• I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.
• I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.
• I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.
• I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.
• I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.
• When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.
• To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.
• The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.
• Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.
• On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.
• I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.
• As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.
• I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.
• My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.
• I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.
• As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.
• For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.
• I do all kinds of roles - nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho - and occasionally someone kind of normal. It's weird, when I lived in Austin I was always cast as pretty normal people. But when I moved to Los Angeles I was immediately branded a psycho.
• I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.
• I went to a performance of 'The Crucible' at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that's what I wanted to do.
• You never really forget who you are. If you did, you'd need to seek some professional help.