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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Adam Johnson

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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Story
Stories
Feels
Good
Surprising
Fresh
Inevitable
Familiar

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What good's a captive without her captor?
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.
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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.
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Today, tomorrow, she said. A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.
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Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.
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A name isn't a person. Ga said. Don't ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they're always with you because they're a part of you.
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[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.
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In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range
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Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.
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The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.
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The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
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The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?
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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
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