During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation. Anthony Marra Read Quote
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy’s career. He began writing his first novel, ‘Childhood,’ while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, ‘Hadji Murad,’ is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century. Anthony Marra Read Quote
Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today’s masterpiece is tomorrow’s birdcage lining. Anthony Marra Read Quote
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning. Anthony Marra Read Quote
It’s hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved – I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who has encountered ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ without falling for them. Anthony Marra Read Quote
A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible. Anthony Marra Read Quote
I think after you write something and you’re finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can’t really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer. Anthony Marra Read Quote
When I came to the last line of ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking,’ I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story’s language. Anthony Marra Read Quote
For the years I spent working on it, ‘Constellation’ was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know. Anthony Marra Read Quote
A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I’m transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life. Anthony Marra Read Quote
