Literary Birthday – 19 January – Tommy Orange

Happy Birthday, Tommy Orange, born 19 January 1982.

Tommy Orange Quotes

1. I put a lot of myself into my characters. It’s not always in a 1:1 way, not always recognizable, but I write from a deeply personal and vulnerable place. (Orion Magazine)
2. [I write] anywhere and whenever I get the chance, always on my laptop. But my favourite place to write is in a hotel room. I’m writing this now from the back of an Uber (van) on the way to an event for Wandering Stars in Santa Cruz, with a laptop in my lap, listening to a playlist I listen to when writing. (Orion Magazine)
3. I generally think of the reader and the reading experience and try to write in such a way that respects the reader’s time and their experience with the page. I’m not trying to entertain necessarily, but I want it to be readable and I want people to want to keep reading it. (World Literature Today)
4. I think writing is another form of thinking, and storytelling is not only a way to remember, but a way to create something new that is a part of us. (Writer’s Digest)
5. What I love about fiction is that it doesn’t pretend to have answers. It poses more questions, and it renders a world where those questions can exist and where the reader can think about them and feel them, but it’s not dogma. (Writer’s Digest)
6. Find a way to make your writing process a discipline in the way that musicians practice their instrument. I think writing has this mystique of like—there’s this binary of inspiration, of being visited by the muse, or you have writer’s block, and I think this really detracts from a discipline. (Writer’s Digest)
7. I don’t think [writing’s] asking of you to be brilliant every time you sit down to write; I think it only asks you to sit down. Occasionally it will ask everything of you if you’re doing it right, and if you’re devoted. (Writer’s Digest)

Tommy Orange is an American novelist. He is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His first book, There There, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and received the 2019 American Book Award. In October 2025, Orange was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program in New Mexico. His latest novel is Wandering Stars.

Source for image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tommy_Orange_2018.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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