Chris Bohjalian
I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.
My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
If you are stymied as a writer, if it's just not coming together, then take the pressure off and don't feel that you need to write 1,000 words today; just write one really good sentence.
My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.
On a regular basis if you're trying to produce something, I think you should work every day and set achievable goals.
When I was 13, my family moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Florida, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend.
I do have hobbies - I garden and bike, for example - but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.
I need complete silence when I write.
People seem to read so much more nonfiction than fiction, and so it always gives me great pleasure to introduce a friend or family member to a novel I believe they'll cherish but might not otherwise have thought to pick up and read.
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.
Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.
There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th century's first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.
I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?
I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain.
On the one hand, I'm this guy who grew up in the suburbs of New York City to very conservative parents, and the other side of me is fascinated by the peripheries of our culture, maybe because that's where our culture is most in transition and where there's likely to be conflict.
As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.
I answer two or three letters a day. I'm just not the he-has-a-secretary kind of guy.
What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.Collection: Memories
With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.Collection: Age
Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.Collection: Distance
Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.Collection: Lying
And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.Collection: Dream
But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?Collection: Doe
He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.Collection: Soldier
But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.Collection: Memories
The world is filled with human toxins -- not the darkness that we all occasionally crave, but actually people who are so unwilling to bask in the angelic light that is offered us all that they grow poisonous -- and you can pray for their eventual recovery and healing. And sometimes those prayers will be answered. But sometimes these individuals have been vaccinated against goodness and against angels and they are so unwilling to give an inch to their God that often they never (and I use this expression absolutely literally) see the light.Collection: Prayer
He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.Collection: Negative
No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.Collection: Alive
We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.Collection: Writing
My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.Collection: Baby
The reality is that most of North America knows next to nothing of the 20th centurys first genocide - the systematic slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the First World War.Collection: War
Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.Collection: Lying
As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.Collection: Country
I have lived with magic and without magic, and I can tell you with certainty that a life with magic is better.Collection: Magic
My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.Collection: Mother
Dead … might not be quiet at all.Collection: Might
When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.Collection: Frightening
The honest answer is more complex. On some level I was sent. Or inspired. Or called. But my calling, such as it was, wasn't a single booming invitation from above (really, is it ever?).Collection: Calling
A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.Collection: Differences