More Stark Than Bleak: The Millions Interviews Richard House

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Closure is an artifice, and it’s also the point where a writer can display their moral position or a neatly packaged world view -- which is almost always problematic. I don’t read to be instructed, I read to discover and debate and to be challenged.
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Infinite Grace: The Millions Interviews Caetano W. Galindo

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The only man who seemed to be showing us, through all that was modern and new in his literature, a possibility for an old-fashioned answer to the great existential questions that have guided philosophers and writers for ages. And he kills himself. When I heard the news, I turned off my computer and played the piano for an hour or so, trying to empty my mind, or fill it with something else.
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Just Try and Stop Me: Jane Smiley Sets Her Sights on the American Century

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The idea for the trilogy, Smiley says, arose in part out of her fury over the political situation in the U.S. since the Bush Administration and a desire to understand “how the country got where it is today.”
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Artifacts of the Present: The Millions Interviews Emily St. John Mandel

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I’m fascinated by the phenomenon where three people will witness the same event and remember it in three completely different ways. Structuring a book in a non-linear fashion with multiple points of view allows me to revisit the same plot points from completely different angles.
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‘The Blank Screen Is the Enemy’: The Millions Interviews David Mitchell

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Realism, when done well, is more fantastical than fantasy.
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Character Assassin: An Interview with Hilary Mantel

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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a horror story for her fans, a fantasy for her detractors. Either way, it’s shocking.
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Building Buzz and Finding Readers: A Conversation with My Publicists

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That’s part of the publicist’s job -- to help communicate how each writer’s story and book is unique.
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Back from the Land: The Millions Interviews Donald Antrim

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My ambition is to disappear entirely, as much as I can, from a reader’s awareness.
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Looking from Across the Room: An Interview with Rebecca Makkai

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I want everything to theoretically have some kind of an explanation, but at the same time there’s this question of luck – can you really have that much good luck or bad luck, or does it at some point start to feel supernatural?
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Don’t Ever Do It For the Money: A Conversation with My Agent

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My failure to convince publishers of someone's talent and commercial viability: that's a sustained shitty feeling that comes with no billable hours.
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Notes from the Purgatory File: An Interview with Leslie Jamison

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If we see something as fully as possible, in all its flaws and troubles, we can pursue it and embrace it more fully as well — there aren’t secrets or dangers festering under the surface.
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You Can’t Avert Your Eyes: The Millions Interviews Teju Cole

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You don’t become a war reporter because you love war. You report on war because it expands and complicates our idea of what war is. As a Nigerian-American who lives in the United States, I would like to complicate our sense of what Nigeria is, of what Lagos is, of what Africa is like. So that’s why I write about it. Not because I hate it. Not because I’m from there. I’m working on my second book on it, and it probably won’t be my last.
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Best Coast: ZYZZYVA’s 100th Issue

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It's hard to think of a single mode in American literature and letters that at this point isn't organic to the West Coast: you name it, there's a writer here who has published a work about it.
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A Narrow Vantage: The Millions Interviews Mona Simpson

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I think there’s a great temptation to sort of resist what it is you do naturally.
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On New Afghan Writing: An Interview with Adam Klein

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I know a teacher’s role is not to be an analyst. Actually, I don’t know this. I don’t know why it would be wrong to bring up where the energy of the text is, where the elisions are. To some degree, you move the writer before they can move their text. That’s what I mean by permission. It isn’t the silent listener at the end of a couch but it feels that way – waiting for a writer to face their anxieties, their resistances.
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Life is Too Short to Read a Bad Book: A Conversation with My Editor

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After I sold my novel to Little, Brown, my editor Allie Sommer and I talked on the phone (for the second time ever). I said, "My parents are so proud of me!" and she said something like, "Mine are so proud of me!"
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We Were Searching for a Reason: An Interview with Claire Cameron

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The attack happened in 1991 in Algonquin Park. It was a couple who were experienced campers. What took me years to come to terms with was that they didn’t do anything wrong, and the bear was just being a bear. It was quite chilling.
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Why Does Roddy Doyle Wish to Disillusion Us?: The Millions Interview

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I couldn’t care less really if I’ve disillusioned you. It is within your gift not to read the book. So really, it didn’t give me the minimum pause for thought.
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