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" I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Childhood
Best
Think
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" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "
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" I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory. "
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Place
" An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck. "
Elizabeth McCracken
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" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "
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" Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. "
Elizabeth McCracken
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" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "
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" New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom. "
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" The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers. "
Elizabeth McCracken
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" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Sound
Always
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" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Music
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" Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Remember
Birth
Child
" Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Look
Writing
Blessing
" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "
Elizabeth McCracken
You
Statistics
People
" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Narrative
Against
Art
" There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Loved
Working
Library
" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Human
Sorrow
Still
" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Mouth
Sword
" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Feel
Over
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" You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' "
Elizabeth McCracken
Humor
Writing
You
" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Short
Hard
Good
" Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Number
Half
First
" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Dead
Story
Person
" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Parents
Family
Children
" When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Out
Map
Husband
" I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Self
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World
" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
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Good
" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Access
Computers
Half
" In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Real
House
Much
" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Sort
Me
" I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Thoughts
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I Am