Amy Hempel Quotes

I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.

For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.

I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.

I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.

I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way they flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn't a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction - dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there's not an end to it.

I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.

I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.

I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?

I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.

It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.

Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum."

When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.

The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.

consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth

He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.

Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?

My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.

Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

I get rational when I panic.

Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.

They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.

I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.

I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.

It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave--and the liar said it really happened--was that once while drinking orange juice, he'd realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar 'realizations.' Is he kidding? I thought. Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn't enough. Once I had food poisoning, and realized I was trapped inside my body.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.

And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

I'm not good at small talk; I'm not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn't come up.