Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Elizabeth McCracken Quotes

I feel like I don’t understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

– Elizabeth McCracken

There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it’s amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I can’t imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it’s sort of automatic.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.

– Elizabeth McCracken

In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I’d have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

– Elizabeth McCracken

When it comes to other people’s writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I’m now more worried that I’ll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

– Elizabeth McCracken

It’s hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children – having a child die or having had two live.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I’ve always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.

– Elizabeth McCracken

There was a time in my life when I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person’s form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

– Elizabeth McCracken

When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay – a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital – to illustrate his second novel.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Vilnius was once known as ‘The Jerusalem of Lithuania’ because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Ordinarily, I’d claim that I’d never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of ‘Peter Elroy’ is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things – all natural qualities of children that I’d like my work to contain.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It’s the sort of place described as ‘book-lined’, but it’s recently tipped over into ‘fire-hazard’ territory.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Acknowledgment of grief – well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

– Elizabeth McCracken

In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I am not a therapy person, but I understand what therapy does. It’s a way of translating dark thoughts into something manageable.

– Elizabeth McCracken

For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people’s computers.

– Elizabeth McCracken

You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people.

– Elizabeth McCracken

When you’ve lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I’m astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single.

– Elizabeth McCracken

The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn’t bring my chairs with me.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

– Elizabeth McCracken

I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed.

– Elizabeth McCracken

Tweeting about objects means I don’t need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, ‘Look at this!’ So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction.

– Elizabeth McCracken

In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they’re frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner’s fault.

– Elizabeth McCracken

- 1
- 2