Latest Leigh Newman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I didn't write the memoir with any sort of intention of feeling better. I wrote the memoir because I had a weird need to write a good story. But once I was done, I did feel better about myself. Not better, just calmer. Because a tremendous onus had been lifted off my day-to-day.

  Leigh Newman

  Writing, Feel Better, Feelings

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

  Leigh Newman

  Writing, Interesting, Mature

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

  Leigh Newman

  Thinking, People, Black

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

  Leigh Newman

  Goal, Swim, Chance

  Source: therumpus.net

• Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.

  Leigh Newman

  Mom, Dad, Crazy

  Source: therumpus.net

• There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.

  Leigh Newman

  Joy, Waiting, Littles

  Source: therumpus.net

• After my parents divorced, my father remarried and my brothers were born when I was twelve and sixteen. I was thunderstruck at these kids. The "baby-ness" of them. Their toes. I had never been around babies before.

  Leigh Newman

  Baby, Brother, Father

  Source: therumpus.net

• Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want to disappoint them. Even though was I was pretty committed to disappointing everybody else.

  Leigh Newman

  Brother, Teenage, Stupid

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't think many kids question their surroundings. Everything seems so permanent and inevitable growing up, even chaos.

  Leigh Newman

  Growing Up, Kids, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

  Leigh Newman

  Mom, Ideas, Parent

  Source: therumpus.net

• I was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.

  Leigh Newman

  Children, Sibling, Only Child

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

  Leigh Newman

  School, Character, Who We Are

  Source: therumpus.net

• I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.

  Leigh Newman

  Thinking, Self, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• The reason I could fit in with so many different kinds of people was that I had no self. And then the problem is, if you don't have a self, how can you be with other people? Who the hell are you with them?

  Leigh Newman

  Self, People, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

• After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.

  Leigh Newman

  Mother, Dad, Alaska

  Source: therumpus.net

• The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.

  Leigh Newman

  Writing, Divorce, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

• It was a life with purpose. And it was also a lot of fun. Fishing is fun. Hiking up mountains is fun. Building a wall out of river rocks dug up from the bottom of a glacial lake is not fun. Not at all. But it does give a work ethic that you can take anywhere in the world.

  Leigh Newman

  Wall, Fun, Lakes

  Source: therumpus.net

• If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

  Leigh Newman

  Eight, Rocks, Underwater

  Source: therumpus.net

• My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to read and set the instruments, as well as the basics of taking off and landing.

  Leigh Newman

  Dad, Taught, Basics

  Source: therumpus.net

• Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.

  Leigh Newman

  Growing Up, Kids, Animal

  Source: therumpus.net

• You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

  Leigh Newman

  Father, Different, Planets

  Source: therumpus.net

• There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

  Leigh Newman

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

  Leigh Newman

  Growing Up, Phones, Cells

  Source: therumpus.net

• I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem.

  Leigh Newman

  Mother, Drunk, Monsters

  Source: therumpus.net

• Maybe it's easier to think about dishonesty and what kind of trouble you can get into as a writer when love and honesty collide and you sidestep that collision, either because you want to protect somebody or you want to blame somebody - which are the usual impulses in love: protection and blame, frequently at the same time - so you don't exactly tell the truth.

  Leigh Newman

  Honesty, Thinking, Usual

  Source: therumpus.net