Best 17 quotes of Nell Freudenberger on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing.

He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.

Phil doesn't say yes, but he doesn't really say no. He's willing to ruin a person's life in order to keep her from being angry at him.

... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.