Anthony Doerr Quotes
-
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.
-
But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.
-
When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
-
Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.
-
Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.
-
Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.
-
It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
-
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
-
We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.
-
My goals aren't really commercial success.
-
My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.
-
Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.
-
In my early 20s, a friend and I worked for a few months on a sheep farm in New Zealand. Working with ewes, I learned a lot about the power of wool - how it keeps you cool when you're hot, warm when you're cold, dry when you're wet.
-
Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
-
Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs.
-
We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
-
I have always felt that it's a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.
-
I listen to podcasts while I run in Boise's foothills.