Will Allison
Will Allison
Will Allison is an American novelist and editor. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Long Drive Homeand What You Have Left...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth22 October 1968
CountryUnited States of America
eye blessing long
Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.
writing libertarian boring
What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
survival desire
... survival is the least of my desires.
truth lying church
...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.
writing order giving
People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
lying fiction telling-the-truth
fiction is the great lie that tells the truth
laughing mama wells
Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.
meaningful pain opening-up
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
drama years proud
Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.
appreciation children mean
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
heart two stories
Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world
class backgrounds contempt
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
running past thinking
I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.
girlfriend quality leisure
Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.