Amy Bloom

“אבי משך אליו את הבאים ואימץ אותם אליו כה חזק, עד שראיתי את רגלם מתרוממת בקו ישר מהרצפה. ליזי ואני נקטנו גישה פסיבית יותר והנחנו לאורחים לעשות בנו כרצונם, ללטף, לטפוח קלות, לחפון את פנינו בכפות ידיהם.”

“I don't think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it?”

“For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.”

“The truth is I never think of any subject as taboo.”

“Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.”

“Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting.”

“I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight.”

“It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often.”

“There are two trilogies I admire: Robertson Davies's 'The Deptford Trilogy' and Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials.'”

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”

“I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.”

“My ideal meal varies, depending on the time of year. Lobster on a deck overlooking a beach at sunset is one - but all my kids have to be there, because they are all lobster-lovers. Making a bolognese sauce over pappardelle for my husband on a winter evening, because he loves my bolognese sauce and it's his comfort food.”

“Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.”

“To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.”

“My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that's true of me, too.”

“My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.”

“'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.”

“'Normal' is not clinical, it's not autobiographical, and I don't claim to be objective. It's strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work.”

“We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating.”