Anthony Doerr

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.”

“Sometimes I wake at 2 A.M. worrying that my great-granddaughter will have to march through her distant, broiling future gathering all the plastic I ever disposed of.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary”

“Travel definitely affects me as a writer.”

“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.”

“I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.”

“Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.”

“It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.”

“Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.”

“'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook.”

“You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull.”

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

“In my students, I'm always dispelling the notion that characters come like a light bulb over the head in cartoons. For me, it's like a shapeless big lump of clay. You just build it into something, and then you step back and go, 'That's not right,' hack it apart, put out a new arm, and say, 'Maybe this will walk around and work.'”

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

“And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes."Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery.""I know, Papa."He picks her up and spins her around three times. "Now," he says, "you're going to take us home."Her mouth drops open."I want you to think of the model, Marie.""But I can't possibly!""I'm one step behind you. I won't let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are.""I do not!""You do."Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind."Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time.""I'm far, Papa. Six blocks, at least.""Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first?"The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond, a staircase, a cliff? She turns ninety degrees. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. "Papa?""I'm here."Six paces seven paces eight. A roar of noise - an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing - overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women came out, jostling her as they pass.Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest."It's so big," she whispers."You can do this, Marie."She cannot.”

“My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.”

“Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.”

“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 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.'”

“My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.”