Richard Yates

"He wrote almost every word of newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. "Dick ran everything of a l…"

"Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were…"

"Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that…"

"The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence"

"Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters because "they can't help being the people they are" —Yates's explicit vision of tragedy."

"Well, she's - sweet," he told her. "She's very sweet, and I guess that's part of the trouble. She's like a little girl - is a little girl."

"In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over "the desolate wastes of time" that had diminished his productivity."

"..."a man doesn't spend all these years building something and then kick it to pieces. Don't - well, to put it coarsely, don't shit where you eat."