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" I always told my dad I'd play professional football. "

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" Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' "

" We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual. "

" 'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook. "

" Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself. "

" I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth. "

" It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. "

" I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out. "

" The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me. "

" Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then. "

" For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth. "

" Basketball games - and seasons - make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions. "

" I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on. "

" In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.' "

" If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat. "

" You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull. "

" Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs. "

" Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things. "

" Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. "

" I guess you could say I've been writing all my life. "

" I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books. "

" Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested. "

" Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die. "

" Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. "

" I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff. "