Karen Bender

Tell your mother that any clothes she wants to purchase you as a gift has to be suitable for a job interview.

At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.

Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.

Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud.

Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating.

Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see, first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling - instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you.

My first published work was when I was 19, in 'Playgirl.' It was an odd experience but exciting.

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

Don't go into any store that features shopping bags that can stand on their own accord in the middle of a table. This sort of shopping bag denotes prices that will start chipping into your children's college education fund. Avoid it.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.

When I was 19 and dropped out of college for several months, I lived for some time with my grandmother.

Don't monitor your online savings account in real time.