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" Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Stuff
See
How
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" At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Library
Job
Woman
" Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Look
Writing
Blessing
" Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Number
Half
First
" When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Powerful
Writing
" I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Childhood
Best
Think
" I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Children
You
Me
" Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Loved
Children
Funny
" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Up
Last
Living
" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Nobody
Good
" In 'Property,' none of the characters are based on any real people, but the house is very much the house that I moved into in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Real
House
Much
" There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Young
Amazing
Fear
" I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Done
Baseball
Work
" An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant's head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Head
Ship
Rocket
" Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Grief
Makes
Well
" When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. "
Elizabeth McCracken
You
Pain
Child
" Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Sadness
Life
Wrote
" I'm a higgledy-piggledy person in every way. On days that I work, I work for eight hours in a row, with my internet access entirely turned off, locked in my office. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Person
Work
Office
" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Sound
Always
Good
" There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Loved
Working
Library
" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Light
Who
Talking
" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Even
Life
Likes
" It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Like
Mouth
Sword
" A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Laugh
Curious
Look
" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "
Elizabeth McCracken
People
Music
Single
" New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Learn
Place
Name
" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Brick
Walls
Over
" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Feel
Over
Better
" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Parents
Family
Children
" There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Story
Short
Life
" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "
Elizabeth McCracken
Short
Hard
Good