Here are some cuts from an interview with Elizabeth Strout, who just won a Pulitzer for her novel Olive Kitteridge. The interviewer is annoying, so I've cut him out as much as possible, but I really like some of the things Strout says about writing and reading.

ES: I do think to myself, “What’s the point of writing,”—particularly, “Why am I writing about this older white woman from New England? What’s the point in that?” And yet my answer is: It’s always, always important to have stories. And I’m recording a time and place in history and about a particular woman from a particular heritage, and this country is changing, and in ways it’s very good.

RB: Could you do it even if you didn’t think it was important?

ES: I would have to. I love writing.

RB: You know there’s no obligation for people to do things—

ES: Someone recently was reminding me of that. No, I do it because I love it. I love it.

RB: Do you read a lot?

ES: I read a lot, yes. . . I think it's the other half of my job. I mean, it’s directly related to writing, I think that one can write as well as one reads. I have to be careful that there are good sentences that are going into my head because I’m very—hopefully you can tell by the work—I’m very interested in how sentences sound. To me, that’s part of the experience of reading, how the sentences fall on the ear, and so I have to be careful when I’m reading that I read things—you know it’s like eating good food and making sure that the right stuff enters [laughs].

RB: Do you think there are some small, finite, predictable conversations when one says they’re a writer?

ES: I think so, yes. There’s the first response, “Well, I’ve always wished that I had the time to be a writer,” and that’s sort of like, OK… and then the second response is, “What have you published?” and the third response, which has always sort of appalled me, is that people will say, “Well, you know that very few people are ever successful at that.” And so it carries a lot of negativity.

The fourth response: "Do you have an agent?"

The fifth response: "Have you written anything I might have read/heard of?"

The sixth response: "Oh, I'm going to do that, too, when I retire."

The seventh response: "So you think you're going to be the next Stephen King, huh?"

On the other hand, what are people supposed to say? What I say to people about their vocations is probably just as annoying. A while ago, someone taught me how to ask my children about their artwork. Instead of pointing at a fingerpainting and saying "What is that?" – which is basically like saying, what you have made is so incomprehensible that I don't even know how to start talking about it – you can say, "Oh, tell me about this."

So that's what I do now when I talk to anyone about what they do. You train manatees? What's that like? Tell me about it. No one expects a question that broad. If nothing else, it throws people off their game a bit.