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" Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs. "

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" Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. "

" But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends. "

" Basketball games - and seasons - make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions. "

" The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me. "

" It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. "

" For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth. "

" Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested. "

" I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on. "

" Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. "

" If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat. "

" I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth. "

" Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die. "

" You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull. "

" I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out. "

" 'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook. "

" I always told my dad I'd play professional football. "

" Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things. "

" I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff. "

" In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.' "

" Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' "

" Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself. "

" We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual. "

" I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books. "

" I guess you could say I've been writing all my life. "