Top 40 Jami Attenberg Quotes

Social media can connect you with other people in so many wonderful ways – but it can also make you really sick of yourself.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I don’t know if I had ever found my place in the world until I fully committed to being a writer.

I was fat because I lived in the Midwest in the 1970s, and everyone was a little fat then and only getting fatter.

I don’t know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won’t talk to me because I’m a woman, and the women won’t talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I’m not Hasidic.

Anything by Lorrie Moore speaks to a certain kind of person.

I actually didn’t grow up in a household that loved Chinese food particularly, and it’s not really my go-to food or anything… We were more a pizza family, being from the Chicago area and all.

I check my phone first thing when I wake up in the morning. I usually take it up with me to bed so it’s on the floor next to the bed, although not actually in bed with me, because I really do not want to be the person who sleeps with their phone.

Sadly, e-mail has triggered the decline of the handwritten note; I have seen its near-disappearance in my lifetime.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I won’t go anywhere near the new Times Square. It’s seizure-inducing.

I wrote a novel. It’s called ‘The Middlesteins.’ It’s fiction. It’s not a memoir. I’m not a spokesperson.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it’s about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it’s about something else, and then by the time you’re done, you can look back and say, ‘Oh, this is what it’s about.’

There are a lot of great things about food, but it’s something that’s an eternal struggle in our contemporary society, where and how food is made, where it’s coming from, how much to consume. There are so many layers to it.

I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone’s Christmas.

I always tell people this when they’re looking for an agent – they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?

For years I’d thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.

With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.

When we are young – or even 32 – we often say ‘yes’ to everything because we’re worried that we won’t know what we’ll like if we don’t try it.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

In 1998, I started a blog, something I could control very easily and update at my own whim.

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.

Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.

I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.

Your family is unavoidable. You cannot escape them or trade them in for another family. You also can’t change them… but you can change your response to them.

An ellipsis is a giant ocean of possibilities.

I have very distinct memories about growing up as part of what was then a very small Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, IL.

It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.

My parents are still married. They don’t weigh 350 pounds; they go to the gym all the time.

The best thing about the Web is the sound of all the individual voices rising.

My love can be easily bought with a steak from Peter Luger’s.

I think when you first start out, you’re writing books that are about your immediate place.

What a character eats is a detail – like eye color or a favorite song. But food is also our lifeblood.

It’s good to pass on stories.

I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I’m still a woman.

My grandmother died when my mother was just 11 years old, and consequently, my mother never learned how to cook particularly well.

I do not mourn the death of the printed letter in a snobby, East Coast, patrician way – ‘Where have our manners gone?’ – but because I love objects, I love paper, and I love something that I can hold to my chest for a moment. Still, I bear no grudge against the e-mail form itself.

The interesting thing about overeating or being obese is there’s this physical manifestation of it.

For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.