Quotes from Nell Freudenberger

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but thought 'Husbands and Wives' was great.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

What do we get out of entering other people's suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?

Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down.

They forget how much they used to love their own parents," she said, "when they were kids.

But it wasn't the intermittent reception or even the whispering that exasperated Amina so much as a familiar trick of her mother's: to bring up a subject in such a roundabout way that Amina had to pry it out of her, as if she were the one who'd wanted to discuss it in the first place.

A novel is a letter you write to someone you don't know.

They know you and George are coming to get us," her mother said. George doesn't want you to come and live with us. "They think we're rich." I can't get pregnant.

She turned off the water, and for a moment she was a newcomer again, alone in the house after George had gone to work.

Mrs. Rahman. It was impossible to know whether Mokta

In Desh, you can make your plans, but they usually do not succeed. But in America you make your plans and then they happen.

Who knows? Why do women do anything they do? Except for you," George amended, as he always did. "You're logical.

But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing.

She wasn't any more familiar with boutique shopping in Bombay or the challenges of dating someone in the movie industry, but she knew what it was to feel that you would never become fully adult in the country where you lived, would never understand the jokes or master the graces that came so naturally to everyone around you.

Phil doesn't say yes, but he doesn't really say no. He's willing to ruin a person's life in order to keep her from being angry at him.

Around the women who frequented the yoga studio she felt perpetually diminutive, and that physical feeling augmented the psychological sense of her own childishness that she felt in America.

It wasn't the degree that counted but what you did with it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper.