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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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Anthony Doerr
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: October 27
Author Of Novels
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Balance
Fiction
Looking
Imagining
Reading
Dreaming
Dream
Traveling
Writing
Findings
Finding
Historical

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Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.
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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.
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A real diamond is never perfect.
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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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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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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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My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
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I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.
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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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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
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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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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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I always told my dad I'd play professional football.
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It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
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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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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
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Travel definitely affects me as a writer.
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.
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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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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