Amy Waldman Quotes

Quotes about:

Character Children Writing

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 the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

Amy Waldman

Japan, People, Novelists

45 Copy quote
[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

Amy Waldman

Fruit, Pessimist, Brown

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.17, Macmillan

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I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?

Amy Waldman

Country, Past, Thinking

"The Fraught, Fictional Road To A Sept. 11 Memorial". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. August 15, 2011.

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Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

Amy Waldman

Christian, Gay, Doctors

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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 drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.

Amy Waldman

Men, Air, Space

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.27, Macmillan

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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 write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.

Amy Waldman

Country, Writing, Class

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Sorrow can be a bully.

Amy Waldman

Bully, Sorrow

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.7, Macmillan

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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 of believers.

Amy Waldman

Religious, Emotional, Community

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Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine.

Amy Waldman

Creativity, Thinking, Naps

"Paperback Q&A: Amy Waldman on The Submission". www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2012.

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Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Amy Waldman

Bridges, Bats

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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 get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

Amy Waldman

Character, Trying, Novelists

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Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Amy Waldman

Secret, Want, Given

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.146, Macmillan

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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.

Amy Waldman

Children, Issues, Parent

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My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

Amy Waldman

Children, Two, Attention

"Paperback Q&A: Amy Waldman on The Submission". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2012.

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I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Amy Waldman

Mash Up, Taste, Kind

"Paperback Q&A: Amy Waldman on The Submission". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2012.

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There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Amy Waldman

Perfect, Decision, Made

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.49, Macmillan

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So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.

Amy Waldman

Virginia, Names, Design

"Journalist Amy Waldman". "The Tavis Smiley show", www.pbs.org. November 15, 2011.

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The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.

Amy Waldman

Islamic, Government, September 11

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While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.

Amy Waldman

New York, Zero, People

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In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It's somewhat controversial and has met some resistance.

Amy Waldman

Block, Taken, Artist

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Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Amy Waldman

Reading, Writing, Character

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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Amy Waldman

Picks

Amy Waldman (2011). “The Submission: A Novel”, p.262, Macmillan

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I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.

Amy Waldman

Children, Book, Wrestling

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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 profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Amy Waldman

Writing, Character, Years

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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 for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Amy Waldman

Powerful, Coffee, Writing

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Born: May 21, 1969
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

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