Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Twain’s ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis’s ‘Time’s Arrow’ wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Never do the dishes without music,’ my brother Mark once advised me – the same brother who once ate a spoonful of refrigerated dog food to escape his turn at the kitchen sink. And really, it may be the most sensible advice I’ve been given. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time.’ Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
What I tell young writers is to find those things that you’re so passionate about that your energy doesn’t run away. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator’s earmuffs. Anthony Doerr Read Quote
For me it was perfect, because it wasn’t a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we’ll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline. Anthony Doerr Read Quote