American - Novelist | 1947 -
Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.
Ron Carlson
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The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.
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I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me.
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I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.
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I believe in teaching as a real job. I don't think it's a substitute for anything else. It's been shown to me that teachers can help, and the writing today is just as good as it was when I started out. Technology hasn't changed that.
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Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.
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I don't write for theme, but if you work closely on some guy fixing a sandwich or a window or a table or trying to visit an old teacher or walking down the street on which he was a boy, a theme, a human hope, will emerge.
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I was writing a third novel when my kids arrived. And I looked at that book about whether these two people would get together, and I thought, 'I don't care! I've got kids!'
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I don't live in books, but, boy, have books amplified my life.
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My parents were farmers' kids from South Dakota. My dad was an engineer. I wanted to be responsible and major in something pragmatic.
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My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.
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Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.
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