Adam Johnson Quotes

• The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea’s alternate reality.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Feels, Thinking

• The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Freedom, Thinking

• It’s true. In America, you can reinvent yourself at any turn. And, you know, if things aren’t going well for you in life, everyone says, change, become someone different.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in True, Yourself, American

• In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in America

  Tags in Person, Characters, Defining

• Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Character, Person, Imagine

• I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Genuine, Discover

• I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel, Speak

• I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thought, Attention, Light

• For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings – all the human actions we think of as essential to a character – had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in True, Character, Punished

• But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you’ll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

  Adam Johnson

  Topics in Youth

  Tags in Story, Towards, Dictated

Adam Johnson (10)

Birth:	12th July, 1967
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Professor, Writer

About

Adam Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist and short story writer. Johnson was born in South Dakota and raised in Arizona. He earned a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University in 1992; an MFA from the writing program at McNeese State University, where he was a classmate of the writer Neil Connelly, in 1996; and a PhD in English from Florida State University in 2000. Johnson is currently a San Francisco writer and associate professor in creative writing at Stanford University. Johnson also wrote the short-story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award in 2003. His work has been published in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, Tin House, and The Paris Review, as well as Best New American Voices and The Best American Short Stories.

Related Authors

• George MacDonald Fraser
• Frederick Rolfe
• Diamela Eltit
• Penelope Fitzgerald
• Raymond Williams
• Frances Mayes
• Tomson Highway
• Larry Dixon
• Hugh MacLennan
• A. J. Cronin

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1944 - Mary Archer
• 1962 - Ralph Fiennes
• 1962 - Mark Ruffalo
• 1948 - Martin Yan
• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard

Deaths

• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 2001 - Lance Loud
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton
• 1998 - Virginia Graham