Richard Yates Quotes

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It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

Richard Yates

Believe, Thinking, People

Richard Yates (2010). “Revolutionary Road”, p.60, Random House

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if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want

Richard Yates

Success, Failure, New Years Resolution

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Never say anything that doesn't improve on silence.

Richard Yates

Silence, Say Anything

Richard Yates (2014). “A Good School: A Novel”, p.90, Picador

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No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.

Richard Yates

Truth, Lying, Reality

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if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.

Richard Yates

Honesty, Being Alone, Done

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If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

Richard Yates

Lying, Simple, Tragedy

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Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.

Richard Yates

People

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And do you know a funny thing? I'm almost fifty years old and I've never understood anything in my whole life.

Richard Yates

Years, Funny Things, Fifty

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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

Inability To Love, Insane, Definitions

Richard Yates (2010). “Revolutionary Road”, p.290, Random House

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Why did everything always change when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to stay the same?

Richard Yates

Might, Certain, Wanted

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You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

Richard Yates

Dying, Culture, Alive

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He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

Richard Yates

Forgiveness, Forgiving, Wanted

Richard Yates (2010). “Revolutionary Road”, p.31, Random House

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Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Richard Yates

Real, People, Emptiness

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The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.

Richard Yates

Running, Grief, Night

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You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.

Richard Yates

Sweet, Jobs, Nice

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I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.

Richard Yates

Crush, Heart, Stories

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Hard work, is the best medicine yet devised for all the ills of man- and of woman.

Richard Yates

Hard Work, Men, Medicine

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People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering.

Richard Yates

People, Wells, Withering

Richard Yates (2010). “Revolutionary Road”, p.156, Random House

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She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?

Richard Yates

Selfish, Complicated, Reason

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Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

Richard Yates

Comfort, Source, Endless

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Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.

Richard Yates

Jobs, Home, Intelligent

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Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say

Richard Yates

Believe, Thinking, Self

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Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Richard Yates

Writing, Tired, Insomnia

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A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room.

Richard Yates

Men, Police, Television

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When you wrote it didn't matter if hysteria sometimes came up in your face and voice (unless, of course, you let it find its way into your "literary voice") because writing was done in merciful privacy and silence. Even if you were partly out of your mind it might turn out to be all right: you could try for control even harder than Blanche Dubois was said to have tried, and with luck you could still bring off a sense of order and sanity on the page for the reader. Reading, after all, was a thing done in privacy and silence too.

Richard Yates

Reading, Writing, Order

Richard Yates (2010). “Young Hearts Crying”, p.184, Random House

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Born: February 3, 1926
Died: November 7, 1992
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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