Charles Bock

“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.”

“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.'”

“It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.”

“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.”

“In English, I never did the reading when it was assigned. If a paper was due on Friday, my attitude was, read half the book on Tuesday, the second half on Wednesday, and write the paper Thursday night. Sometimes, I'd just read the Cliff's Notes and skip the book altogether.”

“Every author dreams of the kind of attention that 'Beautiful Children' has received in the press. Obviously, it's a shock whenever it happens. So yeah, I'm as surprised as everybody else.”

“Las Vegas is a great place to be from, not to live in.”

“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.”

“As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.”

“I very much loved my late wife, Diana Joy Colbert, and I'd rather hold onto what I can.”

“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.”

“I was an unhappy teenager, and there's just no way around it.”

“I'm not really a meditator. I'm, like, a napper.”

“I never ran away, but I was very unhappy as a teenager. I felt like a complete nonentity, and I very tangibly have memories of not wanting to be here - in my body.”

“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.”

“The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.”

“Let's just say I'm a believer in universal, single-payer healthcare insurance.”