Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.

— Jincy Willett

(N)OT writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.

— Jincy Willett

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

— Jincy Willett

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life tenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in Gen Pop.

— Jincy Willett

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jinny Gillett)

— Jincy Willett

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college... Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.

— Jincy Willett

(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

— Jincy Willett

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

— Jincy Willett

When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kenneled River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliché. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. "Why didn't you say something?" they wanted to know, and she said, "I'm not a screamer." "Jesus," said one of them, "couldn't you have made an exception this one time?" "Apparently not," she said.

— Jincy Willett

...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.

— Jincy Willett