We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion. David Ebershoff Read Quote
Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn’t a single marriage that couldn’t provide enough narrative arc for a novel. David Ebershoff Read Quote
An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist – and the writer – reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting. David Ebershoff Read Quote
The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley. David Ebershoff Read Quote
The Danish Girl’ was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me. David Ebershoff Read Quote
I usually don’t throw around the word ‘fabulous,’ but how else to describe buildings decorated with mirrored water dragons, serpents tiled in colored glass, and hundreds – no, thousands, no, tens of thousands – of gold-leaf Buddhas? Luang Prabang has more than 47,000 residents, but its Buddha population must be ten times that. David Ebershoff Read Quote
In some ways, writing a novel, especially a novel set in the past and about characters who once lived, is about amassing enough details and arranging them properly in order to offer the reader a verisimilitude that satisfies his or her curiosity about the story at hand. David Ebershoff Read Quote
Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian’s point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone – all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation. David Ebershoff Read Quote
I’m not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day… I’m the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am. David Ebershoff Read Quote
