And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.

Amy Waldman

Categorized in : Country Class Writing

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

Amy Waldman

japan novelists people

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

Amy Waldman

pessimist fruit brown

In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.

Amy Waldman

space air men

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?

Amy Waldman

country past thinking

Sorrow can be a bully.

Amy Waldman

bully sorrow

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Amy Waldman

mash-up kind taste

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

Amy Waldman

attention two children

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

Amy Waldman

issues parent children

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

Amy Waldman

novelists trying character

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

Amy Waldman

confusion add reality

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

Amy Waldman

confusion people thinking

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.

Amy Waldman

writing years thinking

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Amy Waldman

emotional community religious

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Amy Waldman

bats bridges

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

Amy Waldman

picks

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace.

Amy Waldman

criminals editing reality

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Amy Waldman

given secret want

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Amy Waldman

escalators redemption walking

Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don't you stay home?

Amy Waldman

asking-why home worry

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

Amy Waldman

steps attitude firsts