Quote

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

Amy Waldman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Attitudes
Rhetoric
Step
Steps
Attitude
Firsts
First

More quotes by Amy Waldman

Image
Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
Amy Waldman
Image
My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.
Amy Waldman
Image
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
Amy Waldman
Image
As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.
Amy Waldman
Image
There were in life rarely, if ever, right decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.
Amy Waldman
Image
Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.
Amy Waldman
Image
My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
Amy Waldman
Image
I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
Amy Waldman
Image
[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.
Amy Waldman
Image
Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
Amy Waldman
Image
In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
Amy Waldman
Image
Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine.
Amy Waldman
Image
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
Image
I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.
Amy Waldman
Image
And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.
Amy Waldman
Image
In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
Amy Waldman
Image
So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.
Amy Waldman
Image
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
Amy Waldman
Image
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.
Amy Waldman
Image
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.
Amy Waldman