RON CARLSON

Our pasts so many times determine the value of what is happening today. Everybody is midway in their story.

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.

I have these habits. I'm not a crazy artist. Or am I?

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.

No one among us suffers the radical appreciation for coffee that I do. It calls to me, but I have learned not to listen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

If we're really writing, we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate.

I'm a Midwesterner.

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!'

My parents were farmers' kids from South Dakota. My dad was an engineer. I wanted to be responsible and major in something pragmatic.

I'm not at all sure dialogue is meant to advance the story; I know that sometimes it is the story.

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.

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.

I don't live in books, but, boy, have books amplified my life.

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

I always write about my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.

It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

The writer is the person who stays in the room.

Idolatry is not simply worshiping a stone image; idolatry is any concept of God that reduces Him to less than who He really is.