Alexi Zentner Quotes
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I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'
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I liked the idea of being a writer more than I liked the idea of writing.
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There is no simple answer for what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand answers that come together. But part of that is that there is a national mythology.
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I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.
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One of my oldest friends has a cottage on Smoke Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park, and it's one of my favorite places in the world.
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If you realize early what your influence is, you can have a better understanding of what you are writing about.
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My wife has been incredibly supportive of me as a writer. Trying really hard to make sure I get the space and time I need to work as a writer and being willing to make some of the sacrifices that you have to make to live the life of an artist.
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I believe that art elevates humanity. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of that.
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I've said many times that there only two things to write about: love and death. And when you have children, you remember that the world is full of sharp corners and dangerous things, and suddenly you have these small, soft creatures, which you love in almost painful way.
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I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
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When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.
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There's very little that's comparable to seeing the spark in a student's face when she gets something that she's been struggling with.
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I'm absolutely terrified of spiders.
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I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?
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While Shakespeare wasn't the first voice in the room, in North America and Europe, he's one of the loudest voices.
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Ezekiel Boone's books, starting with 'The Hatching' series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.
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Growing up in Waterloo, the Governor General's Award wasn't something I even thought to wish for.
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I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.
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The story of trying to live up to the myth is more interesting than the myth itself.
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If I think of a reader while I am writing, the only reader who really matters for me is my wife. It's most important to me that she likes what I write.
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I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.
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The worst day of writing is still better than the best day of telemarketing.
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For 'The Lobster Kings,' I listened to a lot of Johnny Cash. And it makes its way into the book.
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As much as I love my daughters, I wasn't happy with only being a stay-at-home-dad, and my wife encouraged me to try, to really try, at being a writer. More than anything, I didn't want to let her down.