Big doors swing on little hinges.
It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.
Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me.
Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.
With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.
Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.
There is already too much truth in the world - an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed!
I just looked at him because I want to be looking in someone's eyes when I die.
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.
The doctor of the future will be oneself.