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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.

Amy Waldman

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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
First
Knew
Useless
Writing
Imagination
Subject
Reporter
Years
Came
Skills
Article
Would
Story
Research
Profile
Write
Characters
Emerge
Stories
Subjects
Assumed
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Novel
Reporters
Firsts
Fiction
Articles

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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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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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
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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.
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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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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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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In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
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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Sorrow can be a bully.
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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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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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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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
Amy Waldman
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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.
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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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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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
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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
Amy Waldman
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Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
Amy Waldman