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" Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin. "

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" All of my close friends are emotional train wrecks. This is what makes our lives interesting - constantly doubting ourselves, worrying, wondering if we've made a mistake. Could we have done better? Are we good people? Are we bad people? "

" If I were to continue to work in an established mode, it stands to reason the work would be limited by this - that it would never surpass the prior work in quality. "

" The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there's no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social. "

" I haven't read hardly any Westerns, to tell you the truth. "

" I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing. "

" Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it. "

" I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great. "

" I was reading my son some fables; it made for good nighttime reading. These stories were very vivid and very strange and occasionally bizarrely violent. It was a very free landscape. "

" Humorous writing is often thought of as substandard in comparison to work with a more dramatic or tragic intent. I don't know what to say to this except that I disagree wholeheartedly. "

" I wrote for so many years in a bubble, the way everyone does, and there were large swaths of time where you think you're doing this for nothing. An audience is crucial, a back and forth with the invisible readers. "

" As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don't want to be taught lessons, and I don't want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome. "

" The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it. "

" I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice. "

" I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years. "

" It's healthy to have interests besides books. "

" I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic. "

" A lot of my favourite books - I should say, not much happens in the books! It's much more about the points of view of the author more than anything else. "

" I am a bit prudish, I think. It's hard for me to write about sex, and I don't really care to read about it, either. "

" I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening. "

" A lot of authors, judging by their list, will put anything out that they finish... That's the worst model I've heard of in my life. It's just idiotic. Why wouldn't you just wait for the good ones? "

" The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing. "

" Looking around, I saw so many unhappy adults, people who loathed their jobs, and I didn't want to be one of them. "

" At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude. "

" Often the starting point for characters, for me, is finding a little, most minor detail, and I'll go from there. "

" I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor. "

" I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right. "

" More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don't know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in. "

" I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation. "

" Many's the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death. "

" When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble. "