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

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" If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. "

" My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. "

" 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. "

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

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

" People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny. "

" If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to. "

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

" I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie. "

" I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell. "

" 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. "

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

" I can be glib and truthful all at once. "

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

" 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. "

" About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good. "

" You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth. "

" I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class. "

" 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. "

" I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while. "

" 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. "

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

" Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book. "