Elizabeth McCracken Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Elizabeth McCracken:

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.

Elizabeth McCracken

Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.

Elizabeth McCracken

My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.

Elizabeth McCracken

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.'

Elizabeth McCracken

Humor reminds you, when you're flattened by sorrow, that you're still human.

Elizabeth McCracken

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

Elizabeth McCracken

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.

Elizabeth McCracken

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.

Elizabeth McCracken

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Elizabeth McCracken

I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.

Elizabeth McCracken

I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over.

Elizabeth McCracken

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault.

Elizabeth McCracken

Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

Elizabeth McCracken

Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.

Elizabeth McCracken

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

Elizabeth McCracken

There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.

Elizabeth McCracken

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me.

Elizabeth McCracken