Carolyn Chute

“We need to stay together, to spread the truth like religion. It's a lonely, scary road, and we've got to walk it together.”

“People who work in factories or in the woods or maybe a dairy farm - for years, I've been fascinated with people like that. No pretensions. They just live their lives. I found them beautiful. They were all I seemed to be interested in writing about.”

“That's the way we see life: your community is your survival. And if you live in a small community like this, even the people you hate you have as friends.”

“If it ran, a Bean would eat it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.”

“Spend as much time as you can in silence. Look at the way the sun paints the ground gold.”

“I like starting projects in January. That's the best time to start something. It's so inward.”

“Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident.”

“People say, 'Well, why don't they get another job, why don't they pick themselves up by their bootstraps?' Well, the people that say that probably have the kind of jobs where they don't work that hard, so maybe they could have another job.”

“It doesn't matter that millions read as long as you share it with somebody. So I don't really think about readers or editors. You especially should never think of editors - especially never think about reviewers.”

“Today's world is very cruel.”

“If it ran, a Bean would shoot it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it.”

“I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.”

“I am a person who can't teach writing or make a living in any public way, as I get confused when interrupted or overstimulated. In a classroom or crowded room, I all but blank out. So my only income is from novels.”

“Sadly I don't work well under restrictions. I need to forget the world and its rules and laws in order to enter the dreamlike flow of the fictional world. So I may be in some bad trouble.”

“My people are mostly underweight or overweight - however it is they turned out, like good bread. Bring back the hunched-over people... Bring back humanity.”

“Grave silence is far more powerful than the same old voices yapping away.”

“I love people, but I don't do so well in a system. We're poor, and we lead a very different kind of life. We depend on other people so much.”

“You go through your life feeling like an outsider, and you respond to society in a different way when you feel like an outsider.”

“Because school was so terrible was probably why I was driven to write.”

“Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.”