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

More quotes by 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.
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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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I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.
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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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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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A real diamond is never perfect.
Anthony Doerr
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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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Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
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Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.
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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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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
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I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.
Anthony Doerr
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I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.
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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
Anthony Doerr
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My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
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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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In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
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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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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.
Anthony Doerr