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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
People
Implausible
Coincidence
Whenever
Novel
Story
Stories
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Alexander Chee

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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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With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
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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 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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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.
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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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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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The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.
Alexander Chee
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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
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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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The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
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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.
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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.
Alexander Chee
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Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
Alexander Chee
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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
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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.
Alexander Chee
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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!
Alexander Chee
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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.
Alexander Chee
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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.
Alexander Chee
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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.
Alexander Chee