About Robert Boswell: Robert Boswell is an American short story writer and novelist.
Ideology is the light that creates darkness.
Americans were no more shallow than any other people, just more pampered, so they had come to treasure their shallowness, making pop singers and television actors their most revered leaders. Pampered but lovable. He loved America, even though he held...
The rain began to fall harder, and it distracted him, but he tried to pull himself back because he felt on the verge of understanding something large and important. It seemed to him that this moment—the light and wind, the sweep of fields, the fall...
The heart was a tyrant, like a child demanding ice cream instead of broccoli and throwing a fit to get its way.
Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.
Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.
We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.
I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the n...
Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.
You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.
I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.
I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.
