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" You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel. "

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" If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life. "

" If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke. "

" I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid. "

" If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to. "

" Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. "

" I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard. "

" I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie. "

" A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once. "

" It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can. "

" I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class. "

" People often ask me how I make things funny. I don't make things funny. "

" I don't think America has ever had a center the way London is the center of England or Dublin is the center of Ireland. "

" Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that. "

" I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. "

" Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view. "

" About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good. "

" I get and read an enormous number of first novels. "

" I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked? "

" Cary Grant never won an Oscar, primarily, I suspect, because he made everything look so effortless. Why reward someone for having fun, for being charming? "

" Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted. "

" You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth. "

" My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. "

" I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them. "

" What does it feel like to be a parent? What does it feel like to be a child? And that's what stories do. They bring you there. They offer a dramatic explanation, which is always different from an expository explanation. "

" I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them. "

" Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me. "

" HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned. "

" You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next. "

" I read pretty voraciously. If it's good, I don't care what it is. "

" When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while. "