Jesse Kellerman

Novelist

1978-09-01

Quotes by Jesse Kellerman

• I had some trepidation about working with someone else, especially a family member. You don't want work to affect your personal relationship.

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• Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.

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• Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

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• I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.

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• I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?

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• I think everyone assumes that I talk to my parents a lot about writing, but I didn't - they're my parents. We didn't have constant workshops running in my household.

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• The final product in a play is not just the written word. It's the production, the performance. The script is, of course, a very important piece; but it's only one element. Ultimately, yours is one of several voices. People can change your work in a play for better or worse.

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