Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?
— Jami Attenberg
For years I'd thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.
With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.
I don't know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won't talk to me because I'm a woman, and the women won't talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I'm not Hasidic.
I kind of want to be seen as an American writer, not just a New York writer.
What a character eats is a detail - like eye color or a favorite song. But food is also our lifeblood.
In addition to public housing, South Williamsburg is home to shabby artists' lofts like mine, apartments of Hasidic Jews, and one extremely tall, high-priced condo.
I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm still a woman.
The best thing about the Web is the sound of all the individual voices rising.
I was fat because my parents were a little fat themselves at that point in their lives, and I ate what they ate.
No matter how much money I made from writing, I'd keep the bookstore job.
I do not mourn the death of the printed letter in a snobby, East Coast, patrician way - 'Where have our manners gone?' - but because I love objects, I love paper, and I love something that I can hold to my chest for a moment. Still, I bear no grudge against the e-mail form itself.
For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.
It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.
I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.
I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.
It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.
Many online journals get the most hits of the day during the lunch hour.
I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.
My parents are still married. They don't weigh 350 pounds; they go to the gym all the time.
Sadly, e-mail has triggered the decline of the handwritten note; I have seen its near-disappearance in my lifetime.
No offense to Bushwick, where all my neighbors greeted me on the street and there is a growing arts community and a curious beauty to its industrial zone, but Bushwick is no Williamsburg, even if the real estate agents would have you believe it is.
I'm from the Midwest. We like to know who our neighbors are.
I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.
In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.
I am not one of those people who string their exes along. Instead, I run and hide: under the covers, behind my computer screen, on opposite coasts of the country.
I have watched Occupy Wall Street mostly from the sidelines.
Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.
I was fat because I lived in the Midwest in the 1970s, and everyone was a little fat then and only getting fatter.
Anything by Lorrie Moore speaks to a certain kind of person.
