Charles Bock Quotes
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As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person.
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I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.'
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A woman at a bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., put Castle Freeman Jr.'s novel 'Go With Me' in my hand, and I took it to be nice. 'Yeah I'll probably read five pages,' I thought. But once I started, I could not put it down.
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Art, you know, art and fiction, especially in big books, you know, it takes a while.
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I didn't have a lot of great jobs. I was a third-shift legal proofreader. I did office work for people where a friend might say, 'Hey, we need someone,' in his office, and then I will have a month or two weeks or whatever somewhere. I was - I taught fiction workshops.
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It's been wonderful to hear so many excited and intelligent responses to 'Beautiful Children,' not only from reviewers but also from the people coming out to my readings.
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A writer has to write something that they're - sit down with or are interested in every day of their life.
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I had a string of really awful jobs in Manhattan where my whole point was to do as little work in the world as possible so I could hoard time to write.
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It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.
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When I was in college, I could only write on a WordPerfect program.
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Too often in this world, the things you root for - whether sports teams or spouses to recover from horrible diseases - don't quite pan out.
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I always thought of Caesars as the gold standard. I had exactly one date in high school, and my father knew someone who got us comped here for the Sammy Davis Jr. show. We heard 'Candy Man,' 'Mr. Bojangles' - the whole list. And then my date and I went off to the dance - homecoming, I think - where she pretty much ignored me.
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I've always been less interested in the person on the top of the Bellagio than I am at the person whose house got moved to create the Bellagio.
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My parents have a pawnshop in Downtown Las Vegas for quite awhile. I grew up seeing people come in and want - need - money so they could go and gamble again or so they could pay their bills or whatever reason, and try and sell items that were of value to them.
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I flatter myself to even imagine I could have had a medical practice. There's no way. I'm not scientific or disciplined enough, lots of things.
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My grandfather was a pawnbroker, and when I was in first or second grade, my parents opened their own store. I probably learned to count by putting pawn tickets in numerical order in the back room of the shop.
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My quilting is dookie. All needlepoint-related things I should do better on, being honest.
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Something I found while writing 'Alice & Oliver' - a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life - is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.
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To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.
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Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project.
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I do think that people go to Las Vegas for 'whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' They go for the spectacle.
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The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.
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Las Vegas is a great place to be from, not to live in.
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What I try to do is write about forgotten people, and, in a certain sense, we're all forgotten.