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

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Anthony Doerr

eye forever inspirational

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.

Anthony Doerr

dream book fall

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

Anthony Doerr

unhappy-person different people

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

Anthony Doerr

forever might hands

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Anthony Doerr

memories book art

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

Anthony Doerr

lucky running thinking

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Anthony Doerr

light life children

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Anthony Doerr

storm night world

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Anthony Doerr

pockets language silence

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

Anthony Doerr

done baby people

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

Anthony Doerr

narrative-structure chocolate miracle

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.

Anthony Doerr

vegetables home country

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anthony Doerr

inadequate language

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Anthony Doerr

cells mother heart

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Anthony Doerr

reading dream writing

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

Anthony Doerr

europe giving book

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

Anthony Doerr

airplane technology lying

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Anthony Doerr

here-and-there childhood waiting

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

writing opportunity jobs

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

Anthony Doerr

reading teaching writing