Michael Gruber

“When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, the way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren't sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: "Be home by ten, okay?”

“I'm a cult writer now. I have a cult readership.”

“But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.”

“'The Book of Air and Shadows' was born during a conference with an intellectual property lawyer on a particular afternoon in November of 2003.”

“The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.”

“There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, "shattered," as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there's a core, and providing they're willing to do the work.”

“There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.”

“I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.”