Words matter. These are the best Amy Waldman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
While researching ‘The Submission,’ I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.
I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government’s approach to Islamic terrorism.
Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless – until they aren’t.
My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject – skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
And as journalists we look for differences – differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We’re very sensitized to difference, but it’s much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.
I wasted years worrying about what other people thought.
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.
In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who’s been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It’s somewhat controversial and has met some resistance.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
I wasn’t sitting around years ago thinking, ‘I really want to write a novel.’
