Literary Birthday – 27 October – Anthony Doerr

Happy Birthday, Anthony Doerr, born 27 October 1973.

Anthony Doerr Quotes

1. Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death… And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.
2. To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.
3. We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.
4. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
5. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience–buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello–become new all over again.
6. It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
7. For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, travelling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
8. I found my first novel difficult. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

Anthony Doerr is an award-winning American author of novels and short stories. He uses slipstream fiction elements in his writing, which defies all genres. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All The Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His fiction has won five O. Henry Prizes and and the Carnegie Medal, among many others. His work has been translated into over 40 languages. His latest book is Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Source for quotes
Source for image: Librairie Mollat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Doerr_(2015).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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