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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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Tea Obreht
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: September 30
Author
Novelist
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Tea Obreht
Told
Whether
Write
Back
Firsts
Book
Calls
First
Writers
Writing
Childhood

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Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.
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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.
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I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
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The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
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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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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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My grandfather and I were very close.
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My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
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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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.
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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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I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
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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A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
Tea Obreht
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I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!
Tea Obreht