Rebecca Makkai Quotes
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When you talk to an author - to any artist, really - you learn something about how they do what they do. I've never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.
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We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.
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In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.
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Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
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I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.
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My sister's a musician. Everyone else in our family, it's either academics or artists of one kind or another. And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with, too. I think, you know, they're always interesting; they lead interesting lives, and I think they're important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way.
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I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn't have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters 'of The Borrower.'
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Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.
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I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.
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With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.
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I've only cried at one book, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you which. It wasn't terribly intellectual. I will admit, though, to crying when I've read books aloud to my elementary class. We read a biography of Gandhi once, and it was very difficult to read the part where Gandhi was killed, because they were waiting for a happy ending.
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There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.
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I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things.
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Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.
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Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.