Daniel Woodrell Quotes

It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

For a long time, I thought you could remain isolated and survive, and I didn't want to change that. But over the last three or four books, I've become more comfortable with the idea that I'm not really throwing anything away by being a bit more open about my books and life.

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.

This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.

The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, 'You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.'

Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.

Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.

I've bumped into at least three people in town who all insist 'Winter's Bone' is about them.

Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.

I said shut up once already, with my mouth.

The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.

When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.

The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.

I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.

I felt like a number of things in me as a writer just clicked.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.

I didn't really expect to be coming to the Oscars.

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.