Mary Kay Zuravleff Quotes

Grid View List View
Quote of the Day Picture Quotes Top 100 Inspirational Quotes Top 100 Love Quotes Top 100 Happiness Quotes
Theodore Roosevelt Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Joe Biden John C. Maxwell Vincent Van Gogh Henry Ford Chanakya Voltaire John F. Kennedy Nelson Mandela
Knowledge Religion God Happy Moving On Jealousy Appreciation Confidence Optimistic Heartbreak
  • Short Story Writer
  • born 1960
  • 9 quotes

Mary Kay Zuravleff, Short Story Writer (born 1960), is quoted 9 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Views, Writing, Book and Dna.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.

I realized early on in writing the book that it needed to be from a family point of view, and that nobody outside the family would weigh in. And then well into writing it, the question became how to balance the perspectives; how to switch between chapters.

Math-thinking, I would say, encourages flipping and substituting letters in words (in the novel, one of the boys double-majors in math and myth, for example, and his twin cracks a joke about the father's handwriting that morphs "cacography" into "dadography").

I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

I tried the line out on some people on the street, like, "What do you think of this: 'the art of family life is to not take it personally'?" And they would laugh. But you know, everybody's got something going on in their families, and then once you have kids, that of course exponentially rises.

In fictional families - in sitcoms, in dramas - the members are sharing huge amounts of their interior lives. And that has not been my real-life experience. In fictional families - in sitcoms, in dramas - the members are sharing huge amounts of their interior lives. And that has not been my real-life experience.

Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL?

In a family, you take on each other's problems and joys differently, and more intensely. The amplitude - and the undulation of the family - is different from the people you just generally bump into on the street, because you're chained together. And what happens if you break that chain? In almost every family that I know, someone has escaped, set themselves free, tried to run away - whatever what you want to call it. And often, they are made more conspicuous by their absence.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is quoted on

Share This Page