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I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: October 27
Author Of Novels
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Many
Opportunity
Needs
Difficult
Cab
Writing
Jobs
Opportunities
Going
Found
Soldier
Kind
Firsts
Driving
Make
Self
Novel
Like
Need
Doubt
First
Sound

More quotes by Anthony Doerr

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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
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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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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
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It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
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A real diamond is never perfect.
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In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
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WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.
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Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
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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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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
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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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I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.
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Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.
Anthony Doerr
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So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
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We live through books we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.
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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.
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Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
Anthony Doerr
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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
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Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.
Anthony Doerr