Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way. "
Tom Drury
Good
Way
Up
Related Quotes:
" I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome. "
Tom Drury
People
Roads
Small
" I think, most of us, when we look back over our lives, see perhaps moments when everything was dangerous and precarious. We're making all these mistakes, and yet somehow we make it through. It's the making it through that that interests me. To go through the valley of trouble and come out the other side. That's what we all have to do. "
Tom Drury
Me
Back
Look
" I do get very involved in making a scene work without giving too much thought about how it affects the overall, which I think is hard to know in any case. "
Tom Drury
Giving
Work
Think
" Very few things are totally devoid of any possibility of humor. If you are aware of that possibility and alive to the scene becoming that way, then it just happens naturally. That's what I feel living is like, too. I find a lot of things that make me smile or make me laugh over the course of the day. "
Tom Drury
Day
Humor
Laugh
" I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel. "
Tom Drury
Best
You
Small
" I don't think of my characters as bumbling. I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given. "
Tom Drury
Try
Best
Life
" I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well. "
Tom Drury
Words
You
People
" If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you. "
Tom Drury
Choice
You
Money
" I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing. "
Tom Drury
School
Think
Book
" I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.' "
Tom Drury
College
God
Living
" I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable. "
Tom Drury
Try
Best
Writing
" I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers. "
Tom Drury
Now
Up
Sometimes
" The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs. "
Tom Drury
Past
Undeniable
Everyone
" My life in the town I grew up in was much quieter than 'The End of Vandalism.' Part of the reason I think I wrote it was because it was too damn quiet when I was young, and I wanted people to come out and talk. And they do. There's so much dialogue in 'The End of Vandalism.' "
Tom Drury
Think
My Life
Quiet
" Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together. "
Tom Drury
Death
Jealousy
Love
" I like the writing life, but it's not something that always makes enough money. "
Tom Drury
Enough
Money
Life