Anthony Doerr Quotes

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

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.

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.

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.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

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

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

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.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience–buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello–become new all over again.