Quote

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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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Brain
Sake
Refresh
Point
Mines
Naps
Less
Mine
Lousy
Words
Creativity
Realise
Helping
Usually
Realising
Work
Took
Producing
Think
Ones
Ran
Thinking
Least
Helps

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Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
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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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In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
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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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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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Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.
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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.
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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.
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Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.
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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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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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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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My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
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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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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
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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.
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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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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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