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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
Like
Need
Doubt
First
Sound
Many
Opportunity
Needs
Difficult
Cab
Writing
Jobs
Opportunities
Going
Found
Soldier
Kind
Firsts
Driving
Make
Self
Novel

More quotes by Anthony Doerr

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It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
Anthony Doerr
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The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
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Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
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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.
Anthony Doerr
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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
Anthony Doerr
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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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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.
Anthony Doerr
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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.
Anthony Doerr
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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.
Anthony Doerr
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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
Anthony Doerr
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
Anthony Doerr
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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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For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
Anthony Doerr
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I always told my dad I'd play professional football.
Anthony Doerr
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Anthony Doerr
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My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
Anthony Doerr
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I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.
Anthony Doerr
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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.
Anthony Doerr
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You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.
Anthony Doerr