Anthony Doerr Quotes
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Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.
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For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.
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I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.
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Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.
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We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we're in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess.
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We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
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Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake.
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I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.
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We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.
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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
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I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.
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Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.
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Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.
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You and I can go on YouTube and learn how to fix a tractor engine or learn Farsi. Groups are using those tools to recruit young people into a climate of hatred.
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Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.
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My goals aren't really commercial success.
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The world is so fundamentally interesting that it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.
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The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.
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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
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I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.
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My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach for our aquarium back in Ohio; we had this big saltwater aquarium back in Ohio. Every time we found anything, any mollusk, my mom would bring out the guidebook and quiz us on what it was, so that stuff was built in early.
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Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.
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It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
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I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.