Words matter. These are the best Anthony Marra Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I didn’t know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn’t even sure how to spell Chechnya.
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.
It’s hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved – I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who has encountered ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ without falling for them.
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I’ve written.
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.
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled ‘Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour’ on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic’s first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
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.
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.
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled ‘The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.’
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy’s career. He began writing his first novel, ‘Childhood,’ while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, ‘Hadji Murad,’ is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.
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.
I’m wondering when you hit the age where people say, ‘Oh, OK, he’s not so young.’
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.
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.
I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I’d funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another’s stories.
