Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.
Amy Waldman
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Talk
Shaped
Space
Architecture
Water
Absence
Even
Material
Men
Materials
Like
Air
Created
Constricting
Silence
Drown
More quotes by Amy Waldman
I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
Amy Waldman
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
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
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
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
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
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
[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.
Amy Waldman
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
Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
Amy Waldman
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?
Amy Waldman
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
Amy Waldman
There were in life rarely, if ever, right decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.
Amy Waldman
In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
Amy Waldman
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
Amy Waldman
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
Sorrow can be a bully.
Amy Waldman
Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.
Amy Waldman
I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
Amy Waldman
