The times I’ve tried not to be funny, it’s never worked, and the times I’m trying not to be dark and just be funny, that never works, either. As varied as my subject matter is, I think the worldview is pretty consistent: seeing darkness and seeing humor. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
In a short story, you can use someone – we’re only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn’t have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters ‘of The Borrower.’ Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don’t think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it’s just so hard to get everything you want into that small form. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
My sister’s a musician. Everyone else in our family, it’s either academics or artists of one kind or another. And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with, too. I think, you know, they’re always interesting; they lead interesting lives, and I think they’re important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
When you talk to an author – to any artist, really – you learn something about how they do what they do. I’ve never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
I’ve only cried at one book, but I’m too embarrassed to tell you which. It wasn’t terribly intellectual. I will admit, though, to crying when I’ve read books aloud to my elementary class. We read a biography of Gandhi once, and it was very difficult to read the part where Gandhi was killed, because they were waiting for a happy ending. Rebecca Makkai Read Quote
