Anthony Doerr Quotes

• You don’t say, I’m going to be a writer when I grow up – at least I didn’t.

  Anthony Doerr

• Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

• It wasn’t until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

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

  Anthony Doerr

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

  Anthony Doerr

• I never played inside as a kid – even in the rain I’d go out.

  Anthony Doerr

• I guess you could say I’ve been writing all my life.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

• I found my first novel difficult. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

  Anthony Doerr

• I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn’t instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don’t feel like I’m a prodigy or something.

  Anthony Doerr

• I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.

  Anthony Doerr

• I always told my dad I’d play professional football.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

• 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.

  Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr (18)

Birth:	1973
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Anthony Doerr is an American fiction writer, known for his novels and short stories. Raised in Novelty, Ohio, he majored in history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he graduated in 1995, and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University. Many of the stories in Shell Collector, take place in Africa and New Zealand, where he has worked and lived. He wrote another book of short stories called Memory Wall; the story "The River Nemunas" from this book was published by the mobile app Storyville. His next novel, All the Light We Cannot See, was published by Scribner in May 2014. It received critical acclaim and was a New York Times bestseller.

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Deaths

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