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" You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief. "

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" During every book, I have a nervous breakdown. Usually it's about two thirds of the way through the book - I'm just comatose on the couch for at least a week, and I eventually break through it and have an answer about how to fix the thing. "

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" You can look at my books and not find particular joy on every page because, of course, what you want to write about is the difficulty of the human experience. You don't want to lie about things to make happy endings and weddings if they don't deserve to happen. But I would be lying if I didn't try to communicate some of the pleasure of being alive. "

" An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college. "

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" Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal. "

" I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life. "

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" Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that. "

" A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one. "

" A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly. "

" It's funny how the present can change the past. "

" I grew up in the suburbs, which I don't think shaped me very much. "

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" I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book. "

" I think screenplay is hard. I've tried that, and it felt really difficult; like, all the stuff I think I'm good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can't do that - or, at least, I couldn't figure out a way. "

" I don't read literary blogs. I used to read them, but it was upsetting when they would talk, in a snarky way, about my friends. "

" I do think that Americans do not understand that things are done differently in other parts of the world and that the other ways people do things are equally accurate ways to do things. Someone else just came up with something different. "

" Human love and desire is my bag. "

" Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn't mean that they didn't teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that. "

" I feel like artists, as much as we'd like to think we're communal, are pretty much loners. "

" I never wanted to be a scientist. "

" They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that. "

" Usually on Sundays, I won't cook because I'll have dinner at my mom's. She's the provost of Mills College in Oakland and lives on campus. It's a very beautiful school in a very bad part of town. "

" I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did. "

" I wake up at 10. I have coffee, and then I spend a half an hour on the computer, where I read newspapers and progressive blogs. I have to tear myself away, or I'll spend all day reading. "

" Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds. "

" I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals. "