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You want a storybook kind of closure with someone when they die, but I think that kind of thing is impossible.
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I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.
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James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.
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Young adult fiction is getting more popular among adults because the writer is trying hard all the time to maintain the reader's interest.
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My grandfather was terminally ill, and any interaction with him felt so incomplete. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that was enough. And, of course, that was true. Nothing could have been enough.
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Writing is more important than being a writer.
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My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.
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As a teenager, I didn't read a ton of teen fiction, and now I feel like I wish that I had.
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My tastes are pretty varied. For instance, I love Wilco. But it's considered dad rock. It's one of my favorite bands, and yet I find it impossible not to think of myself as a dad-in-training when I listen to it.
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I'm influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.