Jami Attenberg Quotes
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For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.
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I'm a really selfish person. But I would do anything for my friends.
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There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.
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When we are young - or even 32 - we often say 'yes' to everything because we're worried that we won't know what we'll like if we don't try it.
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I do not mourn the death of the printed letter in a snobby, East Coast, patrician way - 'Where have our manners gone?' - but because I love objects, I love paper, and I love something that I can hold to my chest for a moment. Still, I bear no grudge against the e-mail form itself.
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I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.
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With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.
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I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.
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I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?
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What I try very hard to do is have an hour or so in the morning when I leave the house and don't have my phone with me. I'll go sit in a cafe and read and handwrite in my notebook and not be facing a screen. My head will be clear. I will be able to hear myself think. Because honestly for the rest of the day it's just screens, screens, screens.
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I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm still a woman.
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In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.
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It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
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I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.
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I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn't believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone's Christmas.
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It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.
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Social media can connect you with other people in so many wonderful ways - but it can also make you really sick of yourself.
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Your family is unavoidable. You cannot escape them or trade them in for another family. You also can't change them... but you can change your response to them.
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In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.
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I did get in a few fights in school. Kids threw around anti-Semitic slurs, not knowing necessarily what they meant. It was probably just something they picked up somewhere, as kids do.
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My grandmother died when my mother was just 11 years old, and consequently, my mother never learned how to cook particularly well.
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I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.
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You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'
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I have very distinct memories about growing up as part of what was then a very small Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, IL.