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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace.

Ben Fountain

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  Late bloomer’ is another way of saying ‘slow learner.

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  If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace.

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  Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

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  If you want to write, then write; if you don’t want to write, then don’t write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I’d keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.

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  Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

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  I got brilliant stories from people who’d never set foot in an MFA program and had published very little, and terrible stories from people who’d published a lot and had all the credentials. It was all over the map and that was part of the fun.

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  You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people.

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  I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

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  At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that.

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  Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

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  Haiti is unique – the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it’s like nothing the world has ever seen.

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  I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly – for about six hours – considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.

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  By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

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  It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me – that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

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  I’m ashamed and embarrassed to say that I’ve read very little of David Foster Wallace’s work. It’s a huge gap in my education, one of many.

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  The smartest thing I did in law school: asking my future wife to go out dancing with me. The smartest thing I did when practicing law: quitting. The smartest thing I’ve done in writing: following my own head and writing what I wanted to write, and nothing but.

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