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" I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years. "

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" I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes. "

" The reason I like Portland is the idea of going to a supermarket and knowing there's no way to be recognized. L.A. is so social. "

" I wouldn't want to write a biography of anyone. I'd feel too inhibited by the facts and too much pressure to do the subject's life justice. "

" More and more, I find myself turning away from everything relating to contemporary society. I don't know how healthy it is, but I am creating a very private bubble that I live in. "

" As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don't want to be taught lessons, and I don't want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome. "

" I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening. "

" Whenever we changed schools, we had to make a new set of friends. At the time, of course, I hated it. But looking back now, I'm really glad I did, because it forces independence on you. "

" Every industry has slack times, and everyone has bad days at work. "

" My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there. "

" I don't know that I'd call myself an optimist. "

" After school, I got a job in a shop in Hollywood and shared an apartment with a friend. I promptly lost my job and got evicted from my apartment, and that happened several times. "

" I've been surprised at how much an unknown like myself can accomplish just by reaching out to people and pleading my case. Quotes for the book cover, reviews and interviews, readings and radio appearances - all this by simply moving ahead and making contact with folks I thought might enjoy the writing. "

" I haven't read a lot of Westerns. But I wrote a Western. The influences were all cinematic. "

" I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor. "

" By the time I left the bar, I was 30. I was a dishwasher. They call it a bar-back, but essentially, I washed dishes for a living. I had no high-school diploma, I had no agent, and my literary successes were non-existent... but it was the only thing I ever wanted to do, so I did feel trapped. "

" Many's the dead author whose body of work has been marred by overzealous publishers or family members. If this happens to me, I vow to seek out the responsible parties and haunt them to the point of death. "

" Especially if you're endeavouring daily to write your own books, you read with a degree of - well, it's hard to forget you're a writer when you're reading. "

" I know a lot of people who use the Internet really wisely. It enriches their lives in some way. "

" I'm either enjoying myself or I'm not. And if I'm not enjoying myself, something's gone terribly wrong. "

" I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great. "

" I have a paranoia that 'Ablutions' is the best thing I'll ever do. "

" I was reading my son some fables; it made for good nighttime reading. These stories were very vivid and very strange and occasionally bizarrely violent. It was a very free landscape. "

" If I were to continue to work in an established mode, it stands to reason the work would be limited by this - that it would never surpass the prior work in quality. "

" I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting. "

" Working in a bar was a horrific idea for me. "

" Bernie Madoff is probably more nuanced then I'm giving him credit for, but I just couldn't get under his skin. "

" The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it. "

" A lot of authors, judging by their list, will put anything out that they finish... That's the worst model I've heard of in my life. It's just idiotic. Why wouldn't you just wait for the good ones? "

" I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right. "

" I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I'm quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there's been a good degree of self-sabotage. "