Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Short
Hard
Good
Related Quotes:
" I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Children
You
Me
" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Light
Who
Talking
" There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.' "
Elizabeth McCracken
Baseball
Words
Saying
" I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Person
Work
Office
" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Science
Green
Back
" Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Stuff
See
How
" When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Back
College
Poetry
" 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
Dark
I Am
" There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Young
Amazing
Fear
" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "
Elizabeth McCracken
You
Statistics
People
" A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Laugh
Curious
Look
" 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
Think
World
" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Forward
Feel
" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Grief
Makes
Well
" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Life
Likes
" I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Done
Baseball
Work
" 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. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Texas
Office
Place
" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Narrative
Against
Art
" 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
" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Human
Sorrow
Still
" 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
" 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
Nobody
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
" 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
" 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
Writing
Story
Short
" There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Story
Short
Life
" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Seeing
Through
Like
" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Brick
Walls
Over
" 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 can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Sort
Me