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" My characters are like my children in a way. I create them, and then I worry about them forevermore. "

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" Not being as self-contained as men, we need to share things: It's almost as though you only know what you feel about things after you share them with a woman. "

" I remember, as a child, wanting all the time to buy my parents presents. I stood around forlornly in fancy shops, unable to afford a single thing. "

" With 'Durable Goods,' I meant only to write about being an army brat. What emerged was a story about compassion - the need for it, the expression of it. "

" I have always believed in helping people whose work I admire. "

" I never was a big believer that you can teach writing per se. "

" In this wide world, I don't think that there's just one person for any of us. I think we look until we find one that feels right, and oftentimes, it works out just fine. "

" I got married at twenty-five and had children right away, so I didn't have the worry that I would never get to have children. "

" I don't have a medicine cabinet. "

" 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. "

" In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story. "

" When I lived in Boston, I had an office that I rented because I found it wonderful to go away from my house to work: It was so quiet, and I couldn't go to the refrigerator or do the laundry. "

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

" Traditions insist upon themselves. Look around, and you will see them trying to exist everywhere, in everyone's life. "

" I like my house to feel like a place where I can just lie back and say, 'Ahhhhh, I'm home.' "

" If I could visit dead authors, I'd head right over to E. B. White, though I'm so in awe of him I'd probably just sit at his feet and weep. He's the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction. "

" Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny? "

" I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had. "

" 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 always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels. "

" You need a place to work that works for you, and you need people to understand that when you are writing, you are doing a rarefied type of brain surgery and therefore should not be subject to a million random interruptions. "

" If I don't feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around. "

" Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea. "

" I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I loved the 'Three Stooges.' I still do - nyuk, nyuk. "

" I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else. "

" 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. "

" I just cannot stand an unmade bed. "