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" When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it. "

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" My first published work was when I was 19, in 'Playgirl.' It was an odd experience but exciting. "

" What is it to be normal, at 12, at 78? What is it like when you can't grow up? "

" My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt. "

" Tell your mother that any clothes she wants to purchase you as a gift has to be suitable for a job interview. "

" Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism. "

" Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud. "

" It's great being married to a writer. You live with someone who can read your work and help you. "

" Don't monitor your online savings account in real time. "

" Don't go into any store that features shopping bags that can stand on their own accord in the middle of a table. This sort of shopping bag denotes prices that will start chipping into your children's college education fund. Avoid it. "

" I was in graduate school. I had a birth control accident and went to get the morning after pill. "

" Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see, first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling - instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. "

" The word inventors have to create a new term to describe how I felt when I learned that 'Refund' was on the shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Story prize - Excited, thrilled, honored, none of them quite do it. "

" At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years. "

" I wrote lots of pages. I showed what I wrote to Iowa friends, and they said, 'Good start.' That was discouraging because I thought it was almost done. "

" When I was 19 and dropped out of college for several months, I lived for some time with my grandmother. "

" Make pumpkin bread as the default gift for everyone. It is cheap, it is beloved, it is carbs. "

" You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing. "

" Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating. "