Amy Waldman Quotes & Sayings

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it. — Amy Waldman

Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine. — Amy Waldman

In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these brass cobblestones, outside the houses Jews were taken away from. It's somewhat controversial and has met some resistance. — Amy Waldman

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated. — Amy Waldman

Marrying Cal, the scion of a family whose wealth dated to the Industrial Revolution and had multiplied through every turn of the American economy since, ought to have eased her worries about failing to climb as high as she believed she deserved. But the money was his, not theirs. The unspoken power this gave him kept her from asking: Why don't you stay home? — Amy Waldman

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.' — Amy Waldman

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro. — Amy Waldman

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge. — Amy Waldman

In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin. — Amy Waldman

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since. — Amy Waldman

Stumble on joy
the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy? — Amy Waldman

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers. — Amy Waldman

The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness. — Amy Waldman

She ate ramen noodles from the vending machine, their texture just a few molecular recombinations from the Styrofoam cup containing them. — Amy Waldman

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed. — Amy Waldman

I wasted years worrying about what other people thought. — Amy Waldman

Tears filled Claire's eyes but, as if they knew their place, didn't leave. — Amy Waldman

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels. — Amy Waldman

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are. — Amy Waldman

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism. — Amy Waldman

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up. — Amy Waldman

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different. — Amy Waldman

His boast of irreligion stayed on his tongue,for what reasons he couldn't say,any more than he could say why words long unuttered floated unbidden into his mind:La ilaha illa Allah,Muhammad rasulullah.The Kalima,the Word of Purity,the declaration of faith.It almost made him laugh:at the moment he planned to disavow his Muslim identity,his subconscious had unearthed its kernel. — Amy Waldman

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes — Amy Waldman

In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. — Amy Waldman

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid. — Amy Waldman

Debbie's facts coincided miraculously with her opinions — Amy Waldman

She knew well the history of which they spoke because her father had been a part of it. When the military overseers of Pakistan had refused to allow the winning party in Bangladesh - then East Pakistan - to form a government, her father had put down his textbooks, left the university, and joined the fight. Hundreds of thousands, millions of deaths later, Bangladesh had its independence. His stories had made a deep impact on on Asma as a child. She had resolved to be as brave, only to learn that as a woman she wasn't expected to be. — Amy Waldman

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan. — Amy Waldman

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't. — Amy Waldman

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary. — Amy Waldman

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end. — Amy Waldman

And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities. — Amy Waldman

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace. — Amy Waldman

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we? — Amy Waldman

Sorrow can be a bully. — Amy Waldman

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism. — Amy Waldman

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you. — Amy Waldman

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. — Amy Waldman

Don't succumb to the fear; don't mistake the absolutism of Khan's opposition for morality — Amy Waldman

Its walls were mirrored, its tables marble, its espresso feral, its pastry stale. — Amy Waldman

Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage. — Amy Waldman

Shut up, you fat water buffalo, rolling in the mud of other people's lives, is what she wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and reminded herself of how Mrs. Mahmoud had held her hand through Abdul's birth, which made her think that if she had found strength enough to push him out, she could hold her meanest comments in. At this moment, it seemed harder. — Amy Waldman

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction. — Amy Waldman

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others. — Amy Waldman

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge. — Amy Waldman