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" 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. "

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" 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

" It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Child

Know

" 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. "

" Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human. "

" When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. "

" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "

" 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. "

" I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line. "

" 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. "

" The thing that most interests me about writing - there are lots of things, but the thing I can't do without - is the hit of happiness a lovely sentence delivers. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Writing

Without

" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "

" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "

" 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. "

" Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper. "

" 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. "

" I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It's a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable. "

" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Seeing

Through

" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "

" 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. "

" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Even

Sort

" 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. "

" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "

" 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. "

" 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

Last

Living

" I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys. "

" I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' "