Quotes from Charles Bock

After Diana passed, I did not believe for one second that I would remarry or that I would be in love again.

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.

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.

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.

Too often in this world, the things you root for - whether sports teams or spouses to recover from horrible diseases - don't quite pan out.

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.

To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.

I very much loved my late wife, Diana Joy Colbert, and I'd rather hold onto what I can.

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.

What I try to do is write about forgotten people, and, in a certain sense, we're all forgotten.

The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.

I was always small and thin. I wasn't the kid who got invited to parties.

My grandfather was a pawnbroker, and when I was in first or second grade, my parents opened their own store. I probably learned to count by putting pawn tickets in numerical order in the back room of the shop.

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.

It's been wonderful to hear so many excited and intelligent responses to 'Beautiful Children,' not only from reviewers but also from the people coming out to my readings.

As I matured, I became a smarter person, a more sensitive person, a more thinking person.

I was not a happy or popular or happy-with-myself kid, and I wasn't an especially motivated student, either.

It's understandable why someone might not want to take on a book they think is emotionally hard.

I always thought of Caesars as the gold standard. I had exactly one date in high school, and my father knew someone who got us comped here for the Sammy Davis Jr. show. We heard 'Candy Man,' 'Mr. Bojangles' - the whole list. And then my date and I went off to the dance - homecoming, I think - where she pretty much ignored me.

I never ran away, but I was very unhappy as a teenager. I felt like a complete nonentity, and I very tangibly have memories of not wanting to be here - in my body.

I was an unhappy teenager, and there's just no way around it.

Let's just say I'm a believer in universal, single-payer healthcare insurance.

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.'