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I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Character
Characters
Firsts
Interested
First
Effects
People
Happened
Story
Whatever
Happens
Foremost
Stories
Telling

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
Amy Hempel
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The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
Amy Hempel
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I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
Amy Hempel
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
Amy Hempel
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When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.
Amy Hempel
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Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
Amy Hempel
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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
Amy Hempel
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Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?
Amy Hempel
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I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
Amy Hempel
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All those years on the psychiatrist's couch and suddenly the couch is moving. Good God, she is on that couch when the big one hits. Maidy didn't tell you, but you know what her doctor said? She sprang from the couch and said, My God, was that an earthquake? The doctor said this: Did it feel like an earthquake to you?
Amy Hempel
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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
Amy Hempel
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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
Amy Hempel
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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
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I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.
Amy Hempel
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Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel
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The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.
Amy Hempel
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My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
Amy Hempel
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I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
Amy Hempel
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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
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I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
Amy Hempel