Elizabeth McCracken Quotes
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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.
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When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
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For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.
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There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.'
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When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel.
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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.
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Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.
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A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.
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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.
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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.
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When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.
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I always want the last line to be really good, which may sound silly, but I want it to be a last pleasing line.
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When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.
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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.'
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Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
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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.
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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.
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Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.
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I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.
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I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.
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I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory.
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It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.
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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.
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I own an e-reader, but I use it almost exclusively to read things that aren't books - student theses, unbound galleys.