Amy Waldman Quotes

33 quotes in 680 categories

• Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.
• Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
• In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
• Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since,…
• The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes
• In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could…
• Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.
• In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
• Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community…
• I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.
• I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
• My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
• My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.
• 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…
• 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…
• As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or…

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