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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.
Adam Johnson
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Adam Johnson
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 12
Academic
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
South Dakota
United States
Literature
Jong
Freedom
Kim
Eye
Dictator
Death
Korea
Truth
North
Without
Cast
Country
Casts
Eyes
More quotes by Adam Johnson
A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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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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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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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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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
Adam Johnson
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.
Adam Johnson
But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.
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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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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.
Adam Johnson
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
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Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down! Conjure up all the strength you have and drive through whatever it is keeping you on your knees. Build up the strength and your knees may never buckle again!
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I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.
Adam Johnson
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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But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
Adam Johnson
[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
Adam Johnson
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?
Adam Johnson
For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.
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What good's a captive without her captor?
Adam Johnson
