25+ William Maxwell Quotes On Education, Religion And Slavery

William Maxwell was an American editor and author. He worked as a fiction editor at The New Yorker for over forty years, and wrote several novels, short stories, and memoirs. He is widely considered one of the greatest editors of the 20th century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William Maxwell on education, religion, slavery.

Top 10 William Maxwell Quotes

1. Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
2. If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
3. Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.
4. Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
5. The nail doesn't choose the time or the circumstances in which it is drawn to the magnet
6. It was lovely when you found students who responded to things you were enthusiastic about.
7. A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.
8. Satin and lace and brown velvet and the faint odor of violets. That was all which was left to him of his love.
9. Who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
10. I am the cat that walks alone.

William Maxwell Short Quotes

• It's deprivation that makes people writers, if they have it in them to be a writer.
• Your reader is at least as bright as you are
• In talking about the past, we lie with every breath we draw.
• My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.
• His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
• The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

William Maxwell Famous Quotes And Sayings

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters — William Maxwell

Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well. — William Maxwell

People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much...But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching. — William Maxwell

I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave. — William Maxwell

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with. — William Maxwell

If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception. — William Maxwell

What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. — William Maxwell

Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about. What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead they don't read books. This I find unbearable. — William Maxwell

A gentleman doesn't have one set of manners for the house of a poor man and another for the house of someone with an income incomparable to his own. — William Maxwell

Life Lessons by William Maxwell

1. William Maxwell taught us that a good editor has the ability to bring out the best in a writer's work, and that the editing process should be done with respect and understanding for the writer.
2. He also showed us that editing is not about changing the writer's voice, but rather about helping them to refine and strengthen it.
3. Finally, he demonstrated that the best editors are those who can bring out the unique qualities of a writer's work, rather than imposing their own ideas on it.