Top 40 Darin Strauss Quotes

Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can’t answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever’s interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, ‘Well, they didn’t like my characters,’ but when you’re the character, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, they actually didn’t like me.’

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who’s sort of you but smarter.

To a lot of us, literature’s eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing – like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture.

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.

I’m no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov’t Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician – perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.

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

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

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.

Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.

I think it’s a wonderful fact about Judaism – at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don’t have it all figured out. God is unknowable.

Maybe the ‘Million Little Pieces’ of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.

Perhaps it’s because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he’d want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers – sometimes it’s the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.

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.’

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.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

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.

I’m really wary of self-help books.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn’t the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

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

My training and my inclination is to invent.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.

If you’re guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can’t imagine how you could have changed it, that’s very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it’s more difficult not to be at fault because it’s a subtler thing.

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.

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.

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

My knowledge of trains – and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight – comes from Alfred Hitchcock.

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.

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

Society isn’t good at dealing with people who have something concrete to feel guilty about or who are dealing with a loss.

I’ve had menial jobs, and ‘professional writer’ isn’t one of them.

I thought, ‘I’ll come back to New York. I worked for the ‘Aspen Times’ when I lived in Aspen. I’ll work for the ‘New York Times’ when I live in New York.’ It didn’t work out that way.

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.

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.

Not to be too ‘Tale of Two Cities’ about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

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.

I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.