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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

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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Parent
Difficult
Ends
Nearing
Children
Aging
Life
Beginning
Parents
Strange
Issues

More quotes by Amy Waldman

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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
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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.
Amy Waldman
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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
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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
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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
Amy Waldman
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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.
Amy Waldman
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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.
Amy Waldman
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Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
Amy Waldman
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Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.
Amy Waldman
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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
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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.
Amy Waldman
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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.
Amy Waldman
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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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I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
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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
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In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
Amy Waldman
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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
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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.
Amy Waldman
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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
Amy Waldman
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The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes
Amy Waldman