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

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I always told my dad I'd play professional football.
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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 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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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
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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 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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Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
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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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I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.
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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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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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You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.
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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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Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
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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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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.
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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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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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