Quote

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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Anthony Doerr
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: October 27
Author Of Novels
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Three
Joy
Stories
Risk
Take
Challenges
Invested
Writing
Takes
Challenging
Life
Wonderful
Risks
Four
Extremely
Less
Short
Write
Months

More quotes by Anthony Doerr

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To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.
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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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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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Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.
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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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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
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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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For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
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I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.
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Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
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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.
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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.
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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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Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.
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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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A real diamond is never perfect.
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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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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