Top 44 Anthony Doerr Quotes

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I’ve been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me – you’re doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

Hour by hour, minute by minute, I make decisions that seem like the right things to do at the time but which prevent me from reflecting on the most significant, most critical fact in my life: Every day, I participate in a system that is weaponizing our big, gorgeous planet against our kids.

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

What I tell young writers is to find those things that you’re so passionate about that your energy doesn’t run away.

We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we’re in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess.

I originally got very interested in memory in high school when my grandmother came to live with us. She had been diagnosed with dementia. It was the first time I had heard the word ‘Alzheimer’s disease.’

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

I listen to podcasts while I run in Boise’s foothills.

I read Stephen Crane’s ‘The Open Boat’ when I was 11.

Gold and diamonds are nice, but clean, crisp, controlled water has long been the preeminent hallmark of the rich.

For me it was perfect, because it wasn’t a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we’ll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.

Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.

Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.

Lewis Robinson’s first novel, ‘Water Dogs,’ is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book, and crystals will shake out.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn’t teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading – it wasn’t just a blank page, laying down words.

The world is so fundamentally interesting that it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.

If our biological imperative is to pass our genes to the next generation, our moral imperative has to be to try, before we become corpses, to leave them a planet they can survive on.

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.

I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I’m like, ‘What do you mean he’s dead?’ We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.

My ribs ache from all the texts I’ll never make time for.

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That’s not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don’t know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we’re here.

Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I’ve got to figure out how this book’s going to end. Otherwise, you’re going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

I was a nerdy kid.

We only get 60 years, if we’re really lucky, as adults on earth, and why not try to wake up every day and learn something and talk to people?

I’ve been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

I have always felt that it’s a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.

My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.

Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.

Every artist wants an audience, and it’s incredible to me how books take on a life of their own and reach people whom you could never meet. That’s what got me interested in writing in the first place.

We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

I grew up in Cleveland, so my heart got attached at a young age to the freight train of sadness that is Cleveland sports.

Maybe scarcity isn’t always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.

Great writers probably shouldn’t be ranked, at least not by me.

In my early 20s, a friend and I worked for a few months on a sheep farm in New Zealand. Working with ewes, I learned a lot about the power of wool – how it keeps you cool when you’re hot, warm when you’re cold, dry when you’re wet.

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan’s ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time.’

When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn’t care all that much if you live or die.

Fridays after school, especially when the weather was lousy, Mom would take me to the library. She’d let me check out whatever I wanted, and I checked out a lot.

My goals aren’t really commercial success.

That’s the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.