Author Quotes

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth abou

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.