Quote

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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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Hold
Avoid
Colony
Since
Seemed
Weeping
Powerful
Finished
Twins
Found
Using
Justification
Ever
Praise
Carried
Coetzee
Writing
Writers
Table
Ample
Later
Tables
Puzzling
Sitting
Coffee
Twin

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