Aimee Bender

“I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.”

“Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.”

“And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.”

“Sherrie would be there, and the last time I’d seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You’re upset, I’d yelled after her, meanly.”

“I have trouble describing my own style, since it's sort of like describing my own eye color or something.”

“For me as a person, friendships are incredibly important to me, but in writing, they can distract me.”

“Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.”

“When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.”

“Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.”

“Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.”

“I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.”

“As a kid, I often figured it was good to be patient to a fault.”

“I write on a very strict 2-hour-a-day schedule, and I really respond to structure and invented rules. So even if I'm finding out good information on a character, I will stop when I'm set to stop.”

“It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened.”

“Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia”

“It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness--cry and then walk--but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.”

“Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.”

“Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she'd heard the front door open and close.”

“I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.”

“I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.”