And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Paddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.  But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.

— Richard Yates

Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?

— Richard Yates

As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter:genuine clarity genuine feeling the right word the exact English sentence the eloquent detail the rigorous dramatization of story

— Richard Yates

Don't worry, I can't be bothered! You're not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You're not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. Furthermore, you are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. I mean, what the hell are you doing in my house if you hate me so much? Why the hell are you married to me? What the hell are you doing carrying my child? I mean, why didn't you just get rid of it when you had the chance? Because listen to me, listen to me, I got news for you - I wish to God that you had!

— Richard Yates

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.

— Richard Yates

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

— 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

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

He's been living on the fringes of art for so many years, talking and talking about it, that he's come to expect all the prerogatives of being an artist without ever doing the work. I mean he's an art bum...

— Richard Yates

How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their Grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.

— Richard Yates