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

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" If I could say anything to aspiring writers, it's to keep your own counsel, first and foremost. "

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

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

" I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them. "

" I think writers are born, not made. "

" It is a happy day when I am asked to publicly recommend a book. It is also a dilemma. When I consider all the books I have loved and depended upon and profited from, how can I pick just one? "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person. "

" Some people read an interesting or provocative newspaper article, and that's the end of that. A writer reads such an article, and her imagination gets fired up. Questions occur to her. She might feel an urge to finish the story that the article suggests. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It feels like my books come true. I write these things, and then they kind of end up happening. I wasn't divorced, for example, when I wrote a book about divorce. "

" Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" No matter what you write, you need an active imagination. "

" 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. "

" You should not pay too much attention to what anyone tells you, including me. It's very, very important to follow your own map. "

" People don't take you seriously, so you have to take yourself seriously. "