Alexander Chee Quotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
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.
The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.
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.
Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.
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.
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.
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.
And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates.The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.
I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love.
