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" I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire. "

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" I think Chicago is the best city in the country, hands down, but I don't like the winter there anymore. "

" Every book is its own experience, the writing of it. "

" Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea. "

" If I'm on the road for Random House, I'm presenting a book with the hope people will buy it. "

" I just cannot stand an unmade bed. "

" When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent. "

" I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy. "

" Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off. "

" I've always felt an overwhelming need to get out what was inside. The vehicle for me was words on paper - not speech, not art, not dance, not anything else. "

" When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work. "

" I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk. "

" The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky! "

" I think titles are extremely important for novels: They can set the tone, tip you off, serve as shorthand for what the essential contents are. "

" I have not been in a book club where there were any men, and I have not, in fact, heard of book groups that were mixed. "

" If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction. "

" No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way. "

" I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se. "

" I remember, as a child, wanting all the time to buy my parents presents. I stood around forlornly in fancy shops, unable to afford a single thing. "

" Really, my sacred place is my study where there are books that I love and things that people have given me. "

" Life is so fragile, so brief. And we seemingly work so hard at trying to ignore that. "

" In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story. "

" Traditions are the inventions of people who mean to routinely put love and comfort and meaning into their lives and in the lives of those they live with. "

" I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it's the opposite: I believe 'Durable Goods' is the best thing I've written. "

" I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels. "

" Women have a real talent for bearing up under hard times. "

" I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children. "

" No matter what kind of writing you do, it's always the details that make the story. "

" As we continue to become a society of tweets, shorter and shorter messages, there's great value in the contemplation and reflection that comes from reading a long body of work. "

" With 'Durable Goods,' I meant only to write about being an army brat. What emerged was a story about compassion - the need for it, the expression of it. "

" I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write. "