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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
Life
Wonderful
Risks
Four
Extremely
Less
Short
Write
Months
Three
Joy
Stories
Risk
Take
Challenges
Invested
Writing
Takes
Challenging

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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 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 always told my dad I'd play professional football.
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
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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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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
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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.
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
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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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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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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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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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Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.
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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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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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Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
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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've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.
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