Quotes from Lee Gutkind

This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

Nonfiction means that our stories are as true and accurate as possible. Readers expect - demand - diligence.

When I talk with my students, I introduce a process of work I call the three R's: First comes research, then real world exploration, and finally, and perhaps most important, a fact-checking review of all that has been written.

Years ago, I met once a week, 9 A.M. sharp, with a therapist whom I will call Dr. Mason. We would settle in well-worn chairs, Dr. Mason, a slender, balding middle-ager in blazer and striped tie, and me, an anxious academic in Levi's and tweeds.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

It is easy to make stuff up - and easy to dig up information and repeat it or report it to others. But to find a real life story with real people in real life situations is quite difficult and time-consuming. Yet, the rewards are worth the effort.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

Storytelling, a primitive art, is as old as the beginning of mankind. People want to receive what's out there in the form of stories, not just facts, opinion, analysis.

curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy

Self-injury forces us to look pain in the face, to see physical evidence of conditions that are usually personal and private. Mental illness is a difficult, confounding subject, one many of us would rather ignore. Self-injury draws our attention to something we don't want to see, and perhaps this is why it makes so many people so uncomfortable.

It was my biggest fear to go crazy like my mom. I worried about waking up one day and no longer understanding reality in quite the same way, being lost in the black hole of madness.

By virtue of the fact that they expect so much less than poor Americans—they don't care about movies, clothes, and cars—they are more content than the poor people in America.

Most mental health problems don't look like we expect. People with crushing depression still laugh and clap their hands. People with bipolar depression still go to work, order coffee at Starbucks, tread in dog shit, get married.

Take care. For yourself, for those you have carried, for the universe, for your deer, for your heart, for your angels, for those you love. There has never been a more selfless selfish act. Take care.

A son is a son until he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter all of your life.

Although victims do not always become perpetrators, a truism repeated by prosecutors at sentencing, as if it were a profound revelation never before put into words, it is the rare serious perpetrator who was not also a victim. . . . It is the rare death row inmate whose life does not read like a case study of extreme deprivation and abuse. It is the rare juvenile incarcerated in an adult prison for rape or murder who has had anything other than the cruelest of childhoods.

Most of all, you need moral courage because nursing is about the pursuit of justice. It requires you stand up to bullies, to do things that are right but difficult, and to speak your mind even when you are afraid.

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .

My idea of a good time is sitting quietly with my own thoughts and not making eye contact with anyone.

grief is not like clinical depression, schizophrenia, or anxiety, which can be diagnosed and treated. The grieving need someone to say "I see you, I hear you, I understand you are hurting and you can tell me more.

We pray, those of us who believe; those of us who don't believe ask, Let me go quickly and peacefully into the night.

There are few things we can control; our emotions are not among them.