Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it's a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with 'Olive.' I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.