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. – Amy Bloom
My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn’t have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments. – Amy Bloom
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too. – Amy Bloom
It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn’t happen very often. – Amy Bloom
When I was a little girl, I thought I was Sydney Carton in Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ I don’t think anyone else did. – Amy Bloom
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. – Amy Bloom
I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the Arrandale public library, standing at the edge of the playground, having broken a tooth in dodge ball, and lying under my covers with a flashlight. – Amy Bloom
I’ve written the best work I know how. And I’m appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work – and that’s pretty much the end of that. – Amy Bloom
My ideal meal varies, depending on the time of year. Lobster on a deck overlooking a beach at sunset is one – but all my kids have to be there, because they are all lobster-lovers. Making a bolognese sauce over pappardelle for my husband on a winter evening, because he loves my bolognese sauce and it’s his comfort food. – Amy Bloom
Keep your mouth shut and see what’s happening around you. Don’t finish people’s sentences for them. Don’t just hear what they say, but also how they behave while they’re saying it. That was great training for writing. – Amy Bloom
I do my business in the morning, and then at 2 P.M., I write fiction for the rest of the day. I like my husband, so I don’t work at weekends. – Amy Bloom
It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It’s not because anyone in their right mind says, ‘You know, what’s the most fascinating thing in the world?’ It’s because you need something new that happens every week in a frame. – Amy Bloom
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. – Amy Bloom
I don’t think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it? – Amy Bloom
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. – Amy Bloom
‘Normal’ is not clinical, it’s not autobiographical, and I don’t claim to be objective. It’s strictly my perceptions and thoughts about the people that I met and the stories that I heard. It was never meant to be an academic work. – Amy Bloom
As children, we think our mother has always been a mother, but it is just one of the roles you may have the opportunity to play. They don’t define you as a human being. – Amy Bloom
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It’s easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story. – Amy Bloom
My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding. – Amy Bloom
If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn’t matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting. – Amy Bloom