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When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

Tea Obreht

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Tea Obreht
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: September 30
Author
Novelist
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Tea Obreht
Details
Focus
Place
Different
Writing

More quotes by Tea Obreht

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death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is
Tea Obreht
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My grandfather and I were very close.
Tea Obreht
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For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.
Tea Obreht
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What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
Tea Obreht
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I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.
Tea Obreht
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In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.
Tea Obreht
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When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
Tea Obreht
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The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
Tea Obreht
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Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.
Tea Obreht
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A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
Tea Obreht
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Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.
Tea Obreht
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A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
Tea Obreht
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No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.
Tea Obreht
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I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
Tea Obreht
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When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
Tea Obreht
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I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
Tea Obreht
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My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
Tea Obreht
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Suddenness, he says. You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.
Tea Obreht
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I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!
Tea Obreht
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My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
Tea Obreht