Anthony Marra Quotes
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Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
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I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.
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I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
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No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
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I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
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To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.
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After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'
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When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
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For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination.
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I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
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I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.
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Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.
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Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
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At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.