ELLEN GILCHRIST

I love New York, but I wish they wouldn't put clothes on their dogs.

My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends.

Having your work honored nationally is a great morale booster.

I love 'E.R.' and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It makes me know I did not waste my life after all by not becoming a medical doctor.

I can't conceive of nursing babies and taking care of children and writing, too. I know there are writers that do that, but I'm too single-minded. I can't stand to be interrupted, whether I'm writing a story or dressing a child.

In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess.

Ever since I was a child, I've kept boxes and drawers and pages of things that I liked. I suppose that it constitutes a journal of sorts, but it's not in a ledger or a notebook.

My childhood is in my brother's house, and I like to visit there and be reminded.

I never thought it was unusual to write, and I've been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school.

I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer.

My ancestors are Highland Scots, and my father's home in north Alabama is so much like northwest Arkansas. I have the same allergies in both places.

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.

The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then.

One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old.

The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.

Work is the thing that stays. Work is the thing that sees us through.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.

Don't ruin the present with the ruined past.

How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

The first thing a writer has to do is find a new source of income.

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.

The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and if they publish it, maybe no one will read it. That is the hard truth, that is what it means to be a writer.