Amy Bloom

“The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.”

“I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment.”

“I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.”

“Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.”

“I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that.”

“As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don't define you as a human being.”

“It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame.”

“My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.”

“Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.”

“My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.”

“I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.”

“Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.”

“My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.”

“I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.”