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" I always thought of Caesars as the gold standard. I had exactly one date in high school, and my father knew someone who got us comped here for the Sammy Davis Jr. show. We heard 'Candy Man,' 'Mr. Bojangles' - the whole list. And then my date and I went off to the dance - homecoming, I think - where she pretty much ignored me. "

Charles Bock

Dance

School

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" When I was in college, I could only write on a WordPerfect program. "

" To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers. "

Charles Bock

Questions

Answers

" I had a string of really awful jobs in Manhattan where my whole point was to do as little work in the world as possible so I could hoard time to write. "

" I flatter myself to even imagine I could have had a medical practice. There's no way. I'm not scientific or disciplined enough, lots of things. "

" I never ran away, but I was very unhappy as a teenager. I felt like a complete nonentity, and I very tangibly have memories of not wanting to be here - in my body. "

" A woman at a bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., put Castle Freeman Jr.'s novel 'Go With Me' in my hand, and I took it to be nice. 'Yeah I'll probably read five pages,' I thought. But once I started, I could not put it down. "

" Too often in this world, the things you root for - whether sports teams or spouses to recover from horrible diseases - don't quite pan out. "

" Las Vegas is a great place to be from, not to live in. "

" Every author dreams of the kind of attention that 'Beautiful Children' has received in the press. Obviously, it's a shock whenever it happens. So yeah, I'm as surprised as everybody else. "

" In English, I never did the reading when it was assigned. If a paper was due on Friday, my attitude was, read half the book on Tuesday, the second half on Wednesday, and write the paper Thursday night. Sometimes, I'd just read the Cliff's Notes and skip the book altogether. "

" The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy. "

" My grandfather was a pawnbroker, and when I was in first or second grade, my parents opened their own store. I probably learned to count by putting pawn tickets in numerical order in the back room of the shop. "

" It's been wonderful to hear so many excited and intelligent responses to 'Beautiful Children,' not only from reviewers but also from the people coming out to my readings. "

" Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project. "

" It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like. "

Charles Bock

Writing

Angry

" Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction. "

" It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard. "

" What I try to do is write about forgotten people, and, in a certain sense, we're all forgotten. "

" My quilting is dookie. All needlepoint-related things I should do better on, being honest. "

" I've always been less interested in the person on the top of the Bellagio than I am at the person whose house got moved to create the Bellagio. "

" One older brother of mine collects comics, and when I was younger, I collected them, too. "

" I was always small and thin. I wasn't the kid who got invited to parties. "

" As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person. "

Charles Bock

Thinking

Sensitive

" I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.' "