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Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: October 27
Author Of Novels
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Even
Bread
Eating
Leave
Saying
Hello
Experience
Vegetables
Become
Routine
Home
Buying
Country
Familiar

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Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.
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My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
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I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.
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It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.
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I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.
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For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
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I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.
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