It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

- Adam Haslett

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

- Adam Haslett

Discovery is the joy.

- Adam Haslett

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I t…

- Adam Haslett

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about. You try not to because it's hard and at times shamef…

- Adam Haslett

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

- Adam Haslett

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, …

- Adam Haslett

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by other…

- Adam Haslett

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

- Adam Haslett