Quotes from Charles Bock

One older brother of mine collects comics, and when I was younger, I collected them, too.

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.

'Death Of A Salesman,' 'Streetcar Named Desire,' these are the things that, when I was growing up, made me want to be an artist.

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 parents have a pawnshop in Downtown Las Vegas for quite awhile. I grew up seeing people come in and want - need - money so they could go and gamble again or so they could pay their bills or whatever reason, and try and sell items that were of value to them.

I do think that people go to Las Vegas for 'whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.' They go for the spectacle.

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.

Las Vegas is a great place to be from, not to live in.

When I was in grad school, I wrote one early story that was Vegas, and then I stayed away from it. I was trying to expand and do different things. I knew I would write about it, but I stayed away for as long as I could.

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.