Words matter. These are the best Charles Bock Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, ‘Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.’
A woman at a bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., put Castle Freeman Jr.’s novel ‘Go With Me’ in my hand, and I took it to be nice. ‘Yeah I’ll probably read five pages,’ I thought. But once I started, I could not put it down.
Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project.
I’ve always been less interested in the person on the top of the Bellagio than I am at the person whose house got moved to create the Bellagio.
Something I found while writing ‘Alice & Oliver’ – a book that is unquestionably a work of fiction, but which also borrows details from my own life – is that writing the truth often requires invention and imagination.
I’m not really a meditator. I’m, like, a napper.
It wasn’t a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, ‘What would happen if I had disappeared?’ And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.
I really love my chosen craft. No matter whether it’s disappearing or disappeared from the mainstream, that’s really been where my mind and heart is.
It’s understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.
In English, I never did the reading when it was assigned. If a paper was due on Friday, my attitude was, read half the book on Tuesday, the second half on Wednesday, and write the paper Thursday night. Sometimes, I’d just read the Cliff’s Notes and skip the book altogether.
The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that’s what writing is all about – empathy.
One older brother of mine collects comics, and when I was younger, I collected them, too.
I had a string of really awful jobs in Manhattan where my whole point was to do as little work in the world as possible so I could hoard time to write.
My quilting is dookie. All needlepoint-related things I should do better on, being honest.
Every author dreams of the kind of attention that ‘Beautiful Children’ has received in the press. Obviously, it’s a shock whenever it happens. So yeah, I’m as surprised as everybody else.
I flatter myself to even imagine I could have had a medical practice. There’s no way. I’m not scientific or disciplined enough, lots of things.
I didn’t have a lot of great jobs. I was a third-shift legal proofreader. I did office work for people where a friend might say, ‘Hey, we need someone,’ in his office, and then I will have a month or two weeks or whatever somewhere. I was – I taught fiction workshops.
I was an unhappy teenager, and there’s just no way around it.
My sister, who is a wonderful and beautiful actress now, when she was 11 or 12, she would go out and take pictures of the punk parties in the desert. She used to have blue hair, and she got kicked out of Las Vegas Day School for having blue hair.
A writer has to write something that they’re – sit down with or are interested in every day of their life.
I was not a happy or popular or happy-with-myself kid, and I wasn’t an especially motivated student, either.
Let’s just say I’m a believer in universal, single-payer healthcare insurance.
‘Death Of A Salesman,’ ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ these are the things that, when I was growing up, made me want to be an artist.
Art, you know, art and fiction, especially in big books, you know, it takes a while.
As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person.
