Dara Horn

“When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.”

“Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.”

“I wanted to explore the kinds of hope and doubt, faith and disappointment, that shape the next generation, whether consciously or not. I suppose, in all of my work, I'm always going back in time.”

“There's no such thing as a problem that's yours and not mine.”

“The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.”

“Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.”

“The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.”

“My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies.”

“I think all parents have a double life.”

“I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense.”

“I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.”

“I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.”

“Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.”

“Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world.”

“Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.”

“Sibling relationships figure in a lot of my books. You don't often see relationships between adult siblings explored in fiction.”