Quotes from Darin Strauss

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.

I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.

Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.

It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.

Things don't go away. They become you.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is.

Self-hate is rarely unconditional.

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.

Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.

I have come to love you in spite of--- Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?

His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren't right even as he couldn't stop presenting them.

I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the coll mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.

We can try our human best at the crucial moment, and it might not be good neough.

I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.