I loved being a soprano. It was one of my very favorite things in life, and thus far, and losing that voice was a profound emotional moment for me in my life. I never became that interested in my adult male singing voice. Alexander Chee Read Quote
When you’re writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why? Alexander Chee Read Quote
In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel ‘War and Peace’ to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805. Alexander Chee Read Quote
I’ve known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her. Alexander Chee Read Quote
I sat down to try to write ‘Edinburgh,’ an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell. Alexander Chee Read Quote
If you compromise, and then you succeed, that’s another kind of feeling. But if you compromise and fail, it’s two failures at least. Alexander Chee Read Quote
It took me a while to get back to ‘The Queen of the Night.’ I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from ‘Edinburgh.’ So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, ‘Oh, I actually really like this idea.’ Alexander Chee Read Quote
My mother’s family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed. Alexander Chee Read Quote
