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Out of context: Reply #5293
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Yes, there's a little autobiography and, I hope, a lot of imagination. But there's always a little element that throws off a spark, for Philip Roth or Tolstoy, for Maupassant, for the writers I like. Stories don't come out of thin air. There's a spark. And that's the kind of story that most interests me. For example, for "Fat," my wife, my first wife, worked as a waitress and she came home one night and told me she had had an enormous man for a customer who spoke of himself in the first person plural: "We would like some more bread . . . We are going to have the dessert Special." That struck me; I found that extraordinary. And that was the spark that gave rise to the story. I wrote that story years later, but I never forgot what my wife had told me.