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" 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.' "

Elizabeth McCracken

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

Elizabeth McCracken

" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

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

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

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

Elizabeth McCracken

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

Elizabeth McCracken

" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" 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

" Remember that a woman who has given birth to a dead child has given birth and is recovering physically, too. Don't be afraid of grieving parents. "

Elizabeth McCracken

" Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. "

Elizabeth McCracken