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Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

Alexander Chee

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Alexander Chee
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 21
Fiction Writer
Journalist
Poet
Writer
Rhode Island
United States
Coincidence
Whenever
Novel
Story
Stories
Think
Thinking
People
Implausible

More quotes by Alexander Chee

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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.
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Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
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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.
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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!
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With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
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Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
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The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
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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.
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I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
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The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
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Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.
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I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.
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My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.
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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.
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Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
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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.
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