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I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.

Vera Nazarian

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Vera Nazarian
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: May 25
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Roots
Ethnic
Interest
Antiquity
Live
Farther
Even
Stem
Love
Angeles
World
Artificial
Stems
Desert
Oasis
East
Technically

More quotes by Vera Nazarian

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If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.
Vera Nazarian
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A boomerang returns back to the person who throws it.
Vera Nazarian
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Some people prefer eating dessert to the main course. These people have never been really hungry.
Vera Nazarian
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I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.
Vera Nazarian
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The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.
Vera Nazarian
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Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity.
Vera Nazarian
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I've just been bitten on the neck by a vampire... mosquito. Does that mean that when the night comes I will rise and be annoying?
Vera Nazarian
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In Lords of Rainbow I start out by taking away color from the world, and in the process show color's vital place in our lives. At least I hope that by the end of the book it's a portion of what the reader comes away with - a sense of how much color perception enriches our lives and how its lack can make our sensory experience incomplete.
Vera Nazarian
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What we need in fantasy is the sudden balm of clarity - a temporary reprieve from life's white noise and clamor of pain, a kind of time-out. Such clarity, a new perspective, is made possible by fantastic metaphor.
Vera Nazarian
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For as long as there's anyone to ask 'Why?' the answer will always be, 'Why not?
Vera Nazarian
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I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.
Vera Nazarian
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Fantasy, at its best, is balm for the soul. But it is faulty logic to assume that balm is necessarily mind-numbing anesthesia.
Vera Nazarian
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In the plains the grass grows tall, since there is no one to cut it. There is no one to water it either.
Vera Nazarian
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Withhold a smile only when the smile can hurt someone. Otherwise, let it bloom forth in a riot.
Vera Nazarian
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A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
Vera Nazarian
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There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.
Vera Nazarian
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I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.
Vera Nazarian
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Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.
Vera Nazarian
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I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said - wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously - first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish.
Vera Nazarian
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The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.
Vera Nazarian