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" If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw. "

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" I don't think success makes one confident. I think it has more to do with character than circumstance. "

" I was never writing for commercial success. It's nice that it has come, but it is not important. "

" I was born in Ann Arbor. I lived for a while in Ohio; Pennsylvania, California for 10 years, and now in Boston. And I lived in Iowa for a couple of years, where I studied at the Writers Workshop. "

" It used to be you sat up in your attic and wrote and went down to a local cafe and talked with people there. "

" Fame is a problem of perspective. "

" I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges. "

" In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything. "

" I like writing about the evil lurking in apparently good people. "

" You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns. "

" One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf. "

" Books were king, but now movies are king, and books are sort of ignored. So now there's no sense of a welcoming community where you live. "

" I no longer practice medicine, but I can say that, for me, medicine was easier - and certainly less emotionally turbulent - than writing. "

" I like certain people's work better than my own. "

" I've discovered over the years that being subject to both the adoration and the vilification actually makes me more disciplined. It makes me understand that it's the idea of writing a great book that propels me now, whereas it used to be the idea of success. "

" The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination. "

" If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life. "

" John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something. "

" In medical school, you're taught to write in this convoluted, Latinate way. I knew the vocabulary as well as anyone, but I would write kidney instead of nephric. I insisted on using English. "

" What's more interesting than the arc of lives? "

" No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much. "

" No one knows why books do well. "

" It's nice when critics say 'Emperor of the Air' is an important book of stories. "

" I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name? "