Top 30 Darin Strauss Quotes

If you‘re guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can’t imagine how you could have changed it, that’s very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it’s more difficult not to be at fault because it’s a subtler thing.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the ‘Aspen Times.’ I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.

Perhaps it’s because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he’d want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers – sometimes it’s the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.

Often it’s the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you’re trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king – and, as we all know, there’s no accounting for Taste.

Regret doesn’t budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can’t amend a moment, can’t even stir a pebble.

I spent three and a half years writing the novel ‘Chang & Eng,’ about the conjoined brothers for whom the term ‘Siamese twins‘ was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

Not to be too ‘Tale of Two Cities‘ about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who’s sort of you but smarter.

I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.

You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they’re not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven‘t been published.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

Memoirs are – memory is – rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable – a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don’t let rejection start to look the same as failure.

Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can’t answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself – forgiving himself – in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?

Maybe the ‘Million Little Pieces‘ of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.

I’m really wary of self-help books.

It’s good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.

I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city – ours could have been any suburb, anywhere – though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.

In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.

Faith is a private issue. At least, I consider it to be one.

I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn’t even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.

Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, ‘I liked your book,’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’ You don’t get something saying, ‘I’m really glad this is in the world.’

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can’t escape each other.