One week after a great day at YALLWEST, I was off to the annual LA Times Festival of Books! It was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire for those of us who love being burned alive. By books. By writing. By mangling a shopworn adage into a tough leathery bit on which to chomp so as to contain our excitement and not draw the attention of USC Campus Security.

Anyway…

Congrats to LATFOB for celebrating 20 amazing years! Once again it was a privilege to attend, and as always the panel discussions I sat in on were nothing short of compelling and provocative. Did you go? What was the highlight for you?

Here’s a taste of what I heard on Day One:

“I thought I’d like to start a story with someone getting decapitated on a roller coaster, which I did. It’s on page 3.”

“I feel like it’s possible to fall deeply in love while also grieving a great loss.”

“What we remember about the books we love are the characters.”

“I’m an evangelist for fiction.”

“A big part of my writing process is forgiving myself.”

“Write what obsesses you.”

“To be a successful writer you have to be extremely disciplined.”

“Every book is a different labyrinth that somehow I have to get to the center of.”

“How do you learn to write a novel? You read a lot of them and then you write one.”

“I write so much because I’m hyperactive. I have the metabolism of a weasel. I have to eat my body weight every day.”

“There are probably 300 writers in America who make a full-time living from writing.”

“You owe it to yourself to be a big supporter of independent bookstores.”

“We have to practice and behave in the literary world we want to live in. We have to be good literary citizens.”

“I think we’ll look back on this time as a golden age of fiction.”

“I have a weird memory; I remember all of my parents’ license plates.”

“It’s more fun to draw something horrible and ugly.”

“New Yorker cartoons are like a magazine within the magazine.”

“People told me that when I went through the process of selling my parents’ house all the questions I had about who they were would be answered. But there was nothing; it was like they were spies.”

“The mistakes and the problems can become the greatest thing in the book.”

“You just have to draw a lot and then eventually you die.”

WHO SAID THIS STUFF: Robyn Schneider, Emery Lord, Meg Wolitzer, T.C. Boyle, Lord, Wolitzer, Sarah Dessen, Lord, Boyle, Boyle, Stephen Morrison, Sandra Dijkstra, Dan Smetanka, Morrison, Roz Chast, Mimi Pond, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Kaplan, Chast