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" Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view. "

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" The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. "

" I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid. "

" I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry. "

" What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation. "

" If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life. "

" I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. "

" I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland. "

" A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. "

" People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. "

" Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it. "

" It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can. "

" Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that. "

" When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again. "

" You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel. "

" I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long. "

" Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. "

" Writers are people who put pen to paper every day. "

" I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is. "

" I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges. "

" You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next. "

" Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming? "

" Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me. "

" I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them. "

" By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. "

" My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired. "

" I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked? "

" A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing. "

" Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes. "

" HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned. "

" America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves. "