Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

All writers have their own pet commandments.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

I'm really wary of self-help books.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Maybe the 'Million Little Pieces' of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'

Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss

I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.