I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information. Anthony Doerr More Quotes by Anthony Doerr More Quotes From Anthony Doerr The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me. Anthony Doerr me weather beauty life If your mind is anything like mine, it can stumble through a half-dozen different thoughts in a heartbeat. Anthony Doerr thoughts your like mind You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull. Anthony Doerr your yourself you time All around us right now, tucked into the valleys and along the coasts, bookshops glow in the winter light. Think of them like singular, magical, and multi-dimensional recipe boxes. They wait for us to pluck out a card, to stand over the stove, to start cooking. Anthony Doerr wait cooking light winter I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay. Anthony Doerr whatever anything new doing I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us - you don't go into debt to get an MFA. It's not like getting an MBA - you're not going to buy yourself out. Anthony Doerr yourself me you green Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake. Anthony Doerr yourself look you long We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel. Anthony Doerr you rainbow experience home Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. Anthony Doerr indeed key memories book We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we're in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess. Anthony Doerr fat pain reading culture Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' Anthony Doerr stars mind sky time For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline. Anthony Doerr me you perfect work My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan. Anthony Doerr mom teacher science school My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach for our aquarium back in Ohio; we had this big saltwater aquarium back in Ohio. Every time we found anything, any mollusk, my mom would bring out the guidebook and quiz us on what it was, so that stuff was built in early. Anthony Doerr drive parents mom time If you're lucky enough to have 70 years of literate adulthood, and if you read one book every week, you're still only going to get to 3,640 books. Anthony Doerr you lucky enough book When people ask for book recommendations, I say this: Do some math. If you read one book every week for the rest of your life, and if you're lucky enough to live for 50 more years, you're only going to get to 2,600 books. Anthony Doerr rest you life people We only get 60 years, if we're really lucky, as adults on earth, and why not try to wake up every day and learn something and talk to people? Anthony Doerr every-day day wake-up people Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here. Anthony Doerr why questions literature science We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual. Anthony Doerr live nothing life art For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth. Anthony Doerr me experience time world
