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" My first published work was when I was 19, in 'Playgirl.' It was an odd experience but exciting. "

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" Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating. "

" What is it to be normal, at 12, at 78? What is it like when you can't grow up? "

" Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud. "

" Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything. "

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" My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt. "

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" Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see, first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling - instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. "

" Don't go into any store that features shopping bags that can stand on their own accord in the middle of a table. This sort of shopping bag denotes prices that will start chipping into your children's college education fund. Avoid it. "

" At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years. "

" The word inventors have to create a new term to describe how I felt when I learned that 'Refund' was on the shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Story prize - Excited, thrilled, honored, none of them quite do it. "

" When I was 19 and dropped out of college for several months, I lived for some time with my grandmother. "

" I was in graduate school. I had a birth control accident and went to get the morning after pill. "

" I wrote lots of pages. I showed what I wrote to Iowa friends, and they said, 'Good start.' That was discouraging because I thought it was almost done. "