Jess Walter Stories Quotations

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.

All we have is the story we tell.

The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.