Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
One of my big inspirations was Céleste Mogador. She was a courtesan who wrote her memoirs in order to pay off her debts, which is a hilarious gesture.
Alexander Chee
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alexander Chee
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 21
Fiction Writer
Journalist
Poet
Writer
Rhode Island
United States
Debt
Courtesans
Wrote
Inspirations
Pay
Memoirs
Inspiration
Debts
Bigs
Gesture
Order
Hilarious
Memoir
Gestures
Courtesan
More quotes by Alexander Chee
Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.
Alexander Chee
The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
Alexander Chee
The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
Alexander Chee
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
Alexander Chee
PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
Alexander Chee
Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
Alexander Chee
Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.
Alexander Chee
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.
Alexander Chee
As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.
Alexander Chee
I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.
Alexander Chee
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
Alexander Chee
Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.
Alexander Chee
The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
Alexander Chee
I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!
Alexander Chee
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
Alexander Chee
The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.
Alexander Chee
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
Alexander Chee
As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.
Alexander Chee
I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.
Alexander Chee
It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for just writing fiction.
Alexander Chee
