I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.
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I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.
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My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.
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I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me.
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I was writing a third novel when my kids arrived. And I looked at that book about whether these two people would get together, and I thought, 'I don't care! I've got kids!'
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I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.
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Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.
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Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.
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Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.