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" Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer. "

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" Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others. "

" I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand. "

" Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible. "

" I was born on an even keel. Family lore says I never cried, even at birth. I felt at ease on earth, in the right place. And like many children, I took comfort in life's regularity: Every few days it rained, the school bus came and went, and my parents were rooted in their union. "

" I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11. "

" I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it. "

" Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog. "

" I often read poetry to 'warm up' before I write. "

" I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart. "

" For several years before I began 'The Folded World,' I worked at an urban college campus and had a job in a tutoring center, and people would come into the tutoring center, and for some reason, they just kept telling me their life stories. "

" I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake. "

" Self-esteem comes quietly, like the truth. "

" I certainly want people to like my writing, but I know that if I write with the intention of trying to please people, the writing will not be good because it will not be authentic. So, ironically, I have to be willing to write something strange or unlovable in order to write anything truly good. "

" 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius. "

" In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead. "

" I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee. "

" I loved Madeleine L'Engle as a child - 'A Wrinkle in Time.' "

" Reading 'Blood Will Out,' one begins to understand how so many people were duped by Clark Rockefeller. All the imposter needs is some kind of initial agreement that he is who he says he is; thereafter, consensus builds via a network of human relationships. "

" Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir! "

" I think marriage and family keeps being written about because that's where we keep our reputations with ourselves - I mean, we can't quite slip the truths we reveal about ourselves at home. "

" I think I have a very American desire and willingness to divulge everything. I would divulge more if I didn't know it wasn't smart. "

" Other than a short article I read in 2008 when the real story broke, I have not followed the Clark Rockefeller case, and 'Schroder' is not a novelization of that story. "

" To me, self-esteem is not self-love. It is self-acknowledgment, as in recognizing and accepting who you are. "

" My personal writing philosophy is to try and write better every day. "