Anthony Doerr Quotations

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.

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.

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.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

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

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

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

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.