Quotes from Amy Bloom

There are around six million people with Alzheimer's in the United States.

Almost two-thirds of these six million people are women. Almost two-thirds of the caregivers for those Alzheimer's patients are also women.

According to Dignitas data, 70 percent of the people who get the provisional green light never contact Dignitas again; the reassurance, the insurance, is all they need.

try hard not to say things like this, but every once in a while my need to prove a point, such a base and unattractive need, rises up and I meet it by telling him things that he doesn't need to hear.

all happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time.

This is not true, that nothing bad will happen, and therefore not comforting to me. It leaves me quite alone with reality, but the way he feels is exactly what I want for him.

couldn't understand why I cried nonstop during these phone calls. I was sure that Brian had Alzheimer's before the MRI; I'd thought, It's not a surprise. But it was a surprise the way every bad thing, even as you see the flames in the distance, even as the terrible thing is upon you, breathing in your ear, hammering on your narrow bones, is still a surprise.

used to write copy. My boss told me: If you gotta say it's upscale, it ain't. My boss said, It's like that guy who tells you he's funny.

We eat a couple of cookies in bed and I point out that there's been a change (not a bad thing but still…) in Rachel Maddow's lip gloss and he admires my keen eye and we brush the cookie crumbs onto the floor because no one is watching. I plump my pillow so vigorously, it knocks everything off my nightstand, and he laughs and says that I'm a danger to myself and others. Those moments are all I want. I want a life of this. He sighs and I sigh.

Those of us who knew him and needed him didn't want to stop grieving, for fear we'd step forward, toward the future, and entirely lose the trace, the smell, and the feel of him.

Perspective is useful, of course: It's why very few people want to be eighteen again. But the other side is having so much perspective, it's hard to give a damn about anything happening here in the real.

We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time.

So, now I know that not only will the German people stand for it, so will the Americans. It turns out we'll stand for any goddamn thing the government will do on our behalf, and if that includes a boot in the kidneys or taking everything a man has and throwing it on his front lawn for the neighbors to pick through, we're okay with that. We're better than they are, I hear, because we're not exterminating a whole people. Future generations will admire our restraint.

Your father says you're the smart one." "Not the pretty one," I said. I was mortified. "Oh, you can fake pretty," she said.

We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time. You can imagine how often he said that.

I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don't work at weekends.

I'm overall a big fan of President Obama.

My target audience is anyone who finds the world interesting and human behavior fascinating, terrible, inspiring, funny, and occasionally, mysterious.

I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.

I usually don't have to do a lot of research in my work, as I'm writing about something I'm already familiar with.

I didn't think being a writer was a fancy thing. It was a job like any other job, except apparently you could do it at home.

It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame.

Keep your mouth shut and see what's happening around you. Don't finish people's sentences for them. Don't just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they're saying it. That was great training for writing.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.