Wars break things; they break stories. Anthony Marra More Quotes by Anthony Marra More Quotes From Anthony Marra Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing. Anthony Marra something research real writing I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read. Anthony Marra my-life parents fun life A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible. Anthony Marra women nature humanity men To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real. Anthony Marra place important tree book I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya. Anthony Marra person how know single You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time. Anthony Marra look me you time My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school. Anthony Marra woman college children school I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars. Anthony Marra english find single two When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me. Anthony Marra about me jokes people There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot. Anthony Marra i-think something think russia I'm wondering when you hit the age where people say, 'Oh, OK, he's not so young.' Anthony Marra people-say you age people Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors. Anthony Marra inside think time war I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them. Anthony Marra sign days left politics I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery. Anthony Marra good childhood brain time When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language. Anthony Marra empathy car family language I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer. Anthony Marra think you book world For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know. Anthony Marra how know you want A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life. Anthony Marra daily experience imagination life I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death. Anthony Marra great politics love death I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book. Anthony Marra after head book way
