Leni Zumas Quotes

• It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

  Leni Zumas

  Art, Thinking, Five Senses

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

• Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

  Leni Zumas

  Moving, Space, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

  Leni Zumas

  Language, Heaviness, Carrie

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

  Leni Zumas

  Long, World, Membranes

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There's relief in white space for the reader.

  Leni Zumas

  White, Space, Relief

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

  Leni Zumas

  Teacher, Way, Students

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Realist, Conventional

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

  Leni Zumas

  Decision, Pushing, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Mean, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.

  Leni Zumas

  Reading, College, Contemporary Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

  Leni Zumas

  Thinking, Decision, Watches

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

  Leni Zumas

  Portland, Places To Live, Magnificent

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.

  Leni Zumas

  Loss, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Men, Narrators

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

  Leni Zumas

  Different, Next, Problem

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Class, Outlaw

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

  Leni Zumas

  Teacher, Teaching, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.

  Leni Zumas

  Thinking, Knowing, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

  Leni Zumas

  Littles, Remember, Dramatic

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

  Leni Zumas

  Forever, Done, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

  Leni Zumas

  Book, Cutting, Hints

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Focus, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

  Leni Zumas

  People, Hopeful, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Character, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

  Leni Zumas

  Writing, Cutting, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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