NELL FREUDENBERGER

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought 'Husbands and Wives' was great.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.