As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source – it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there’s often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction. Amy Waldman Read Quote
And as journalists we look for differences – differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We’re very sensitized to difference, but it’s much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities. Amy Waldman Read Quote
I read Claire Messud’s ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ I read Joseph O’Neill’s ‘Netherland’ – but to me, they’re not 9/11 novels. In ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn’t wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And ‘Netherland’ felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don’t see them as 9/11 novels. Amy Waldman Read Quote
Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 – confusion even. And I think that’s hard to capture in journalism. Amy Waldman Read Quote
Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words – usually lousy ones – for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine. Amy Waldman Read Quote
My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are. Amy Waldman Read Quote
I’m kind of a mash-up of taste – Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro. Amy Waldman Read Quote
I found ‘The Twin’ sitting on a coffee table at a writers’ colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it – weeping – a day later, and I’ve been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since. Amy Waldman Read Quote
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren’t so different. Amy Waldman Read Quote
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed. Amy Waldman Read Quote