Amy Bloom

For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.

I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.

My grandmother tended to divide life into 'nice' and 'not so nice.' Life in America, her apartment, her grandchildren: 'nice'; life before 1915: 'not so nice.' That's all I heard.

My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn't want to work for other people, there wasn't any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I - that smart people can make their own livings.

We have our insides and our outsides, and I find the struggles between the two, as well as the occasions of harmony between the two, fascinating.

I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting.

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.

Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.