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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mona Simpson Quotes

Gossip is essentially storytelling: storytelling about people whom we know.

– Mona Simpson

‘Casebook’ is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

– Mona Simpson

I’m a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that’s not life.

– Mona Simpson

I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.

– Mona Simpson

I left the Midwest when I was twelve years old, and I haven’t lived in a small town since.

– Mona Simpson

I felt like any other American kid. I already worked at a steady job as an ice cream scooper, but I didn’t feel less in any way than my more affluent friends from school.

– Mona Simpson

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.

– Mona Simpson

I’m a simple cook, and there’s a lot I don’t eat. But food is important. It translates so easily into pleasure.

– Mona Simpson

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

– Mona Simpson

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

– Mona Simpson

I’ve never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one.

– Mona Simpson

I remember the excitement of finding a great pancake recipe in ‘Gourmet.’ It felt as if it were mine. And it was Berkeley, of course – everybody cooked together. Cooking is what one did.

– Mona Simpson

The more you learn about animals and animal rights – it’s an intriguing, fascinating world.

– Mona Simpson

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

– Mona Simpson

I grew up with a single mother, and although we didn’t have a lot of money, she cared a great deal about what we ate. We were the original health-food family. We shopped at what were called health-food stores before Whole Foods – everything came from bins.

– Mona Simpson

We’re all looking for an authentic way to be engaged in the community, engaged in politics, engaged in national discussion – and so, we’re clunky. We’re all clunky. But it’s better than not doing it.

– Mona Simpson

I suppose ‘My Hollywood’ is only as politically meaningful as it is deeply inside the least powerful of its characters. I wanted it to reveal scenes of subtle exploitation, odd instances of accidental power and challenges to decency specific to its time, but also impulses of generosity that transcend our particular era’s messes.

– Mona Simpson

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man, and he was my brother.

– Mona Simpson

I’ve never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy’s Prince Kutuzov.

– Mona Simpson

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

– Mona Simpson

The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James – someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.

– Mona Simpson

We have all these cultural assumptions about love. People get hurt, and we say, ‘Oh, it’s no one’s fault.’

– Mona Simpson

When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of her clients and his little sister while the parents went away on vacation. She brought me along.

– Mona Simpson

It’s a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.

– Mona Simpson

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

– Mona Simpson

I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling – a fascinating book, ‘Mind Hunter.’

– Mona Simpson