Alexander Chee Quotes
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I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.
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When you're writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?
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When I left the state of Maine for college, I met my first really rich friends, and I discovered summer could be a verb.
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I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.
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I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.
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The best relatively contemporary portrayal of a courtesan that I've ever seen was probably in 'Children of Paradise,' a film that was made during the Nazi occupation of France, made in secret actually.
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ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future - a future they didn't yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act.
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The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.
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The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.
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Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the 'rusticators,' as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors.
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It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'
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Andrea Schulz became my editor in 2009.
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As a young writer, I questioned the idea that I had to write fiction in a world where I could write my own ethnicity only and nothing else. 'Fach' to me was a little like that. As a biracial person, that's an inherently unstable identity.
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The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.
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By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'
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It is expensive to live in hotels, even cheap ones - more expensive than renting.
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In some ways, in 'The Queen of the Night,' I'm writing about some of the experience that I had with 'Edinburgh' where I was entirely unable to speak about what had happened to me as a child, but I could read from the novel.
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The day in 2011 that I went to the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan with my partner Dustin to register for our domestic partnership was coincidentally also the first day same-sex partners were allowed to register for marriage in the state of New York.
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Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.
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In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.
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I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.
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I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
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Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.
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My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.