Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

An indigo snake leaves a lasting impression.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Many parks in Florida have information kiosks with colorful enamel signs showing the special flora and fauna in the park. The gopher tortoise, the scrub jay, the indigo snake. At no park with an indigo snake on its kiosk signs could I find an indigo.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Christmas is the season I use to clock failure in life. It stops time, as it were, on the year - where you are in it, where you are in your travail unto the grave.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I met Donald Barthelme when I was 30, and it's fair to say that before that moment, I was pre-modern, and after I met him, I was nudged rather forcefully towards this other end of the spectrum.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Every other year, I was the new boy. I found that the only way to survive was to embrace it, make a little fortress on the outside and to pretend to blend in but not to invest too much because you'll be somewhere else next year.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

When I write, I want something to sound good itself.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I was always the new kid, and I got to know the language and the politics of being on the outside, looking in. Never being in the clique - always being a student of the clique, a subversive, and I could look around and identify the other guys who were excluded.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Conversations are the most direct way to connect with people.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

In my experience, great reviews almost always ensure no sales.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I think William Trevor is as good as it gets. Whenever I want a book to do exactly what it says it will, I read him.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell

I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.