Quotes from Amity Gaige

We argue, but we never change each other's minds. We only get farther apart.

I live in fear of making an honest mistake in conversation followed by some kind of Maoist-style recrimination session.

It's tiring to carry the weight of eternally unsaid words.

We come from nothing & return to nothing, but in between we're supposed to lead lives of grace and courage?

Fair, what a useless word. A concept that is relevant only in the rare moments when there is no greater danger than unfairness.

If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you're happy or not, so why wait for permission?

Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

If you could literally 'rid' yourself of your problems by voicing them, I'd be all for it. But since that isn't so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?

Other than a short article I read in 2008 when the real story broke, I have not followed the Clark Rockefeller case, and 'Schroder' is not a novelization of that story.

I think I have a very American desire and willingness to divulge everything. I would divulge more if I didn't know it wasn't smart.

Childhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?

It's dangerous to accept crisis as your baseline. It gets harder and harder to see the anti-crises that are so requisite to happiness: the quiet times, the crucial pauses - like those in a poem.

Self-esteem comes quietly, like the truth.

When you feel the need to moan and groan, laugh with woeful recognition and eat flaky pastries. If you hear yourself taking the art of complaining a little too seriously, ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish, exactly.

To me, self-esteem is not self-love. It is self-acknowledgment, as in recognizing and accepting who you are.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

I researched children's rights, divorce law, and parental kidnapping. Millions of children and parents are touched by the inadequacy of the legal system to deal with the human heart.

Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.

Several paranoid suspicions occurred to me, the worst of which was that my whole identity was merely a patched-together set of behaviors designed to keep my parents joined to each other - the repertoire of tricks of a small but intelligent dog.

I think marriage and family keeps being written about because that's where we keep our reputations with ourselves - I mean, we can't quite slip the truths we reveal about ourselves at home.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.

In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.