Darin Strauss Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Darin Strauss:

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

Darin Strauss

For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.

Darin Strauss

In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.

Darin Strauss

I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.

Darin Strauss

It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.

Darin Strauss

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.

Darin Strauss

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

Darin Strauss

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Darin Strauss

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.

Darin Strauss

I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.

Darin Strauss

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.

Darin Strauss

I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.

Darin Strauss

I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.

Darin Strauss

I'm really wary of self-help books.

Darin Strauss

My training and my inclination is to invent.

Darin Strauss

Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.

Darin Strauss

I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.

Darin Strauss

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Darin Strauss

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Darin Strauss

Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'

Darin Strauss

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.

Darin Strauss

Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.

Darin Strauss

You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.

Darin Strauss

Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.

Darin Strauss

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

Darin Strauss

What's Denver's feel? I know there're mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city.

Darin Strauss

My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.

Darin Strauss

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Darin Strauss