Allan Gurganus

It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men. ”

I'm a great admirer of Primo Levi's work. It's always mind-boggling, the idea of how much pain people can endure and still come back from the edge with a sense of humor, with this tremendous animal desire we have to get on with life. ”

People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things. ”

I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of 'The New York Times.' It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread. ”

My mother had a master's degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father's family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Moneymaking was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. ”

People have asked me about the 19th century and how I knew so much about it. And the fact is I really grew up in the 19th century, because North Carolina in the 1950s, the early years of my childhood, was exactly synchronous with North Carolina in the 1850s. And I used every scrap of knowledge that I had. ”

The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business -whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town. ”

Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness. ”