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" I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff. "

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" You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull. "

" Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' "

" In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.' "

" I always told my dad I'd play professional football. "

" I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth. "

" For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth. "

" Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die. "

" If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat. "

" I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on. "

" Basketball games - and seasons - make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions. "

" Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself. "

" It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. "

" But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends. "

" I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books. "

" Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. "

" Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs. "

" Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then. "

" Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things. "

" The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me. "

" Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. "

" Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested. "

" 'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook. "

" I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out. "

" We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual. "