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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

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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Attention
Two
Become
Children
Closer
Much
Develop
Made
Watching
Pay
Almost

More quotes by Amy Waldman

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While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.
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Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
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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.
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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
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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.
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I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
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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.
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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.
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In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
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There were in life rarely, if ever, right decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.
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In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It's somewhat controversial and has met some resistance.
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[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.
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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.
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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.
Amy Waldman
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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.
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The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes
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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.
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Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.
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Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
Amy Waldman