Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like to go where the life is.
Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
Mothers aren't allowed to have favorite children!
I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.
The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.
Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.
I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work.
Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.
I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.
There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.
I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.
I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.
A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.
My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They're very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.
I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.
After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.
As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.
I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.
I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.
That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.
In a regular class I don't focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.
I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.
If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write.
I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I've been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I've been pretty lucky.
That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.
Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.
Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.
I figure that I'm always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It's the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.
I like living near my family, and near the people I understand the best. The landscape of Michigan speaks to me, and the humility and humor of the people here makes sense. It just feels right to live here, in a place where I don't dare put on airs.
Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.