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Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.

For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on you; at least you can say that you're halfway through and know that this maps onto some clear, visualizable chunk of narrative.

A social worker named Cosette Rae, along with a therapist named Hilarie Cash, founded 'ReSTART' in what, until then, had been Rae's house.

Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.

I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.

Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.

If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.

Upon reading the deeply serious opening of Scott Spencer's 'Endless Love', you will very likely laugh out loud. The tone is something like what you might find in a teenager's diary: verbose, feverish, furiously self-important.

Enrichment happened to be my favorite time of day in the Children's Zoo, since it offered relief from the security-guard-esque standing around that makes up most of a zookeeper's day.

In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.

During the couple of years it took to write 'At The Bottom of Everything', I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.

To learn a piece on the piano - even a simple one - has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a chapter in a book, every bit as tedious and hopeless and halting. But this is not to say that the piano hasn't helped my writing. It has, just not in the ways I expected.

For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.

I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'

There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.

In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.

Philip Roth has made a cottage industry of unlikable characters, but compared with Mickey Sabbath, the furious and profane protagonist of 'Sabbath's Theater,' Roth's earlier creations seem like Winnie the Pooh.

'At Freddie's' takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.

When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject - the death of a parent - without writing an entirely sad book.

Penelope Fitzgerald's nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from the shelf with a single stretched hand. You'd be holding an eclectic bunch.

Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.

True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.

When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.

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