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" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "

Elizabeth McCracken

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" 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.' "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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" I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys. "

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" When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer. "

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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 wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "

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" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "

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" Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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. "

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" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "

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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

" It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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