Elizabeth McCracken

Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.

My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war.

When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was.

It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.

Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship.

The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar.

I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic.

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.

Acknowledgment of grief - well, it makes feeling the grief easier, not harder.

For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.

I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me.

I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory.