'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.

Allan Gurganus

Categorized in : World Book Culture Heart

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

Allan Gurganus

different kind knows

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

Allan Gurganus

sugar stories people

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

Allan Gurganus

shapes simple littles

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.

Allan Gurganus

writing jobs believe

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Allan Gurganus

lasts fifty years

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.

Allan Gurganus

shapes writing fall

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

Allan Gurganus

pages kind ears

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

Allan Gurganus

events writing mean

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!

Allan Gurganus

best-things objects body

The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business -whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town.

Allan Gurganus

you family business father

To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.

Allan Gurganus

daily remember life world

Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.

Allan Gurganus

person madness work way

People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things.

Allan Gurganus

furniture rich enough people

I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.

Allan Gurganus

friend new me house

I was born in Rocky Mount, NC. The town of 24,000 proved a great place to spend the first 17 years of life. But, after that, onward, outward.

Allan Gurganus

place great born life

After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.

Allan Gurganus

studying being sound education

I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of 'The New York Times.' It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread.

Allan Gurganus

i-am me coffee work

When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.

Allan Gurganus

down some up you

Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell.

Allan Gurganus

i-am always sometimes sex

For anybody living out their twenties, Sex and Career remain major topics: being sexy can help give you a career, and having a career can make others finally find you sexier.

Allan Gurganus

help you sexy sex