Chris Bohjalian

“I do have hobbies - I garden and bike, for example - but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.”

“But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.”

“As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.”

“I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.”

“...this was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed.”

“My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.”

“Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.”

“When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend.”

“A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom--I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else--but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.”

“Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband's. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.”

“On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.”

“On the one hand, I'm this guy who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to very conservative parents, and the other side of me is fascinated by the peripheries of our culture, maybe because that's where our culture is most in transition and where there's likely to be conflict.”

“What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.”

“My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.”

“And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.”

“I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?”

“I answer two or three letters a day. I'm just not the he-has-a-secretary kind of guy.”

“I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.”

“My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.”

“If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.”