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" I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer. "

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" 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. "

" My mother and her five sisters have always been living examples of the great love that can exist among sisters - and in a large family. "

" 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. "

" Ideas come from life: what happens in mine, what I see happening in others', mixed with a great deal of imagination. I might see a person in a grocery store and build a whole character and life out of what's in her basket. "

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

" When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship. "

" I think conflict is one of the things that makes for a good story. "

" As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them. "

" The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books. "

" Elvis is symbolic of a lot of things, dreams coming true being one of them. "

" 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. "

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

" As a child, I saw my mother prepare for Christmas every year, and it never occurred to me that labor was involved. I thought it was my mother's joy and privilege to hang tinsel on the tree strand by strand, to make sure that every room in the house had a touch of Christmas, down to the Santa-themed rug and hand towels in the bathroom. "

" As for the notion that everything has already been said, maybe it has, but life is like meatloaf: there are so many different ways to present it. "

" I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another. "

" When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen. "

" If there were a category in the Olympics for laundry, my mother would have been a gold-medal winner. "

" When I lived alone in Chicago, I had a lot of loneliness issues. "

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

" I love libraries, as anyone who has a brain does. "

" I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American. "

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

" I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, 'Ahhhhh, I'm home.' "

" Writing was always a release for me, a great joy. It wasn't work. "

" The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff. "

" I love to listen to people talk, especially when they're being really honest and they're not trying to sound any particular way. "

" Oftentimes, I need to write about something in order to understand it. "

" 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. "

" I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else. "

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