Quote

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.

Susan Orlean

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Susan Orlean
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 31
Journalist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Writing
Spend
Time
Pure
People
Worth
Challenging
Pieces
Unknown
Challenges
Arguing
Knowing
Discovery
Means
Piece
Mean
Reader

More quotes by Susan Orlean

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Recently, I have come to assume that any call to my landline is from a telemarketer or an automated call from Terminex, letting me know that our regularly scheduled pest-extermination service will occur on its regular schedule. So I usually ignore my home phone.
Susan Orlean
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I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!
Susan Orlean
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I think coexisting with another life form is a very rich experience. It's why people keep plants and animals.
Susan Orlean
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Among all life forms, there are creatures with charisma and creatures without. It's one of those ineffable qualities we can't quite define, but we all seem to respond similarly to.
Susan Orlean
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I've used Twitter now and again to try to figure something out it's an amazing resource. But I think you have to use it judiciously: it's a self-selected group, so it's important not to start thinking of it as the whole world.
Susan Orlean
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Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
Susan Orlean
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I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
Susan Orlean
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In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them.
Susan Orlean
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The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I'm tired. I have been tired for decades. I am tired in the morning and I am tired while becalmed in the slough of the afternoon, and I am tired in the evening, except right when I try to go to sleep.
Susan Orlean
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Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.
Susan Orlean
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One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.
Susan Orlean
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Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.
Susan Orlean
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College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.
Susan Orlean
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Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.
Susan Orlean
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Here's a habit I never thought I'd develop: I gravitate to anything online that's marked 'most popular' or 'most e-mailed.' And I hate myself a little bit every time I do.
Susan Orlean
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The first thing I think about when I wake up most mornings is the fact that I’m tired.
Susan Orlean
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Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
Susan Orlean
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Animals can seem more pure. Without complication, I mean, animals are selfless. What animals do for us, they do out of instinct.
Susan Orlean
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Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn't matter, that it's trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I'd write about art.
Susan Orlean
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States should pass laws making it illegal to own or trade wild animals the phony 'educational' permits that many private owners have used to skirt those laws should be eliminated.
Susan Orlean