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" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "

Elizabeth McCracken

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" You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' "

Elizabeth McCracken

" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.' "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "

Elizabeth McCracken