Alexander Chee
The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.Collection: Beauty
Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.Collection: Reading
Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.Collection: Book
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.Collection: Long
PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.Collection: Heart
One of my big inspirations was Céleste Mogador. She was a courtesan who wrote her memoirs in order to pay off her debts, which is a hilarious gesture.Collection: Inspiration
Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.Collection: Thinking
I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.Collection: Ideas
The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.Collection: Real
Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.Collection: Editors
As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.Collection: Different
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.Collection: Rights
As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.Collection: Teacher
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!Collection: Identity
With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.Collection: Writing
I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.Collection: Writing
It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.Collection: Spiritual
The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.Collection: Horse
Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.Collection: Character
I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.Collection: Real
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.Collection: Book
I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!Collection: Writing
My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.Collection: Boys
Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.Collection: Greek
I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.Collection: Trying
The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.Collection: Editors
Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.Collection: Looks
The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.Collection: Artist