Anthony Doerr Quotes
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Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.
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I listen to podcasts while I run in Boise's foothills.
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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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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.
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When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
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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.
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My goals aren't really commercial success.
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I have always felt that it's a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.
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We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.
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Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.
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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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Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
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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.