Susan Straight Quotes

For someone like me who’s lived in the same place her whole life – I mean, I lived three blocks from where I was born, and I met my future husband in the eighth grade – there are always family stories and legends passed down.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I never saw a gun until I was 24. I didn’t grow up in Mayberry; I grew up in Southern California.

I’m trying to make the readers feel as if he or she is right there in the conversation, and so I don’t try to manipulate it too much.

All my best memories of my brother are in vehicles, speeding, predatory or celebratory. We were just made to drive. For the last 12 years of his life, he lived as caretaker of an orange grove. There, on 18 acres, my brother collected cars and trucks and motorcycles.

I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.

The American fantasy of love is the ‘meet-cute,’ ‘Love at first sight,’ and ‘You had me at hello!’ The completely spontaneous version of accidental love, which doesn’t care about demographics and social compatibility.

All I am is a writer and a mom.

I still live in the same place I’ve lived all my life.

My father, born in Colorado, met my mother, born in Switzerland, when he went into the finance company where she worked and asked for a loan.

The best thing I could say is you do have to be a really good listener. If I go to a family reunion, and there’s 400 people there, everybody comes up and tells me their stories, right? And I think that when you’re a good listener, and you can imagine how someone’s talking, dialogue is your key friend, is it not?

My mother and father split up when I was three and my brother was still in the womb.

I love election day, and I love to vote.

I don’t write about myself. I’m never in my books.

I have not ever been able to decide how would my girls have fared if they came up in a different time?

Marriage wrecks any decent relationship.

My brother acquired his first gun when he was very young, from a recently-fled drug dealer’s residence. Now, he lived in a rural orange-grove area, and he shot at coyotes who killed his animals and at drug runners who used the groves for transport. Sometimes he joked that he only shot what moved.

It’s always fun to talk about a novel.

My mother was born in Switzerland, my stepfather in Canada.