45+ Richard Yates Quotes On Education, Success And Everything

Richard Yates was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, which was adapted into a 2008 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. His other works include The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and A Good School. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Richard Yates on education, leadership, success.

Top 10 Richard Yates Quotes

1. It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.
2. if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want
3. And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.
4. if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.
5. Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.
6. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?
7. Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
8. In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
9. A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.
10. Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

Richard Yates Short Quotes

• Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.
• Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.
• If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!
• You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.
• No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.
• ...his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.
• He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.
• Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.
• Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.
• People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.

Richard Yates Quotes About Love

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying. — Richard Yates

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world. — Richard Yates

There's never been anything funny about a woman dying for love. — Richard Yates

Richard Yates Famous Quotes And Sayings

You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for. — Richard Yates

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged. — Richard Yates

...you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and “We’ve got to be together in this thing” when you meant the very opposite ... and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were. And how could anyone else be blamed for that? — Richard Yates

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort. — Richard Yates

Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same? — Richard Yates

He knew it was possible for shame to be nursed and doctored like an illness, if you wanted to keep it separate from the rest of your life, but that didn't mean there'd be any way to keep from knowing it was there. — Richard Yates

He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. … The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted — Richard Yates

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look. — Richard Yates

Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were. — Richard Yates

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing? — Richard Yates

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive. — Richard Yates

If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy. — Richard Yates

Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say — Richard Yates

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life? — Richard Yates

I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart. — Richard Yates

Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg--'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it? — Richard Yates

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place. — Richard Yates

He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I'll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation. — Richard Yates

She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone. — Richard Yates

God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us. — Richard Yates

What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you've started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right", and "Whatever you think is best", and "you're the most wonderful and valuable thing int he world", and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. — Richard Yates

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times. — Richard Yates

Life Lessons by Richard Yates

1. Richard Yates teaches us to be honest and authentic in our writing. He emphasizes the importance of capturing the nuances of human emotions and experiences in our stories.
2. He also encourages us to strive for excellence in our craft, and to never settle for mediocrity.
3. Finally, Yates reminds us to be brave and to take risks with our work, as this is often where the most rewarding and meaningful stories can be found.