Darin Strauss Quotes & Sayings

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? — Darin Strauss

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.' — Darin Strauss

I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you didn't risk your face in the mirror. — Darin Strauss

My training and my inclination is to invent. — Darin Strauss

Diminish the influence of fate — Darin Strauss

We can try our human best at the crucial moment, and it might not be good neough. — Darin Strauss

For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc. — Darin Strauss

The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses. — Darin Strauss

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction? — Darin Strauss

Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand. — Darin Strauss

My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened. — Darin Strauss

What's impossible to communicate, what you can't experience unless you're part of it, is the sensation of being in a real-life marriage. Even little chats seem to be floating in some kind of really ast liquid, and that vast liquid is the ocean of shared feelings and memories and shorthands, of understanding and misunderstandings between the couple
their history ocean. More and more of their business tends to go underwater, and so even the important words feel only like individual waves popping up from that ocean. All that context, that history, and those impressions from real life that the couple logs and drowns in, it all washes over everything — Darin Strauss

I consider myself a Jewish writer - even if my characters frequently are not Jewish - in the same way, I guess, that I consider myself a Jewish man, even though I don't often attend shul. — Darin Strauss

Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

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

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom. — Darin Strauss

What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register? — Darin Strauss

I thought, 'I'll come back to New York. I worked for the 'Aspen Times' when I lived in Aspen. I'll work for the 'New York Times' when I live in New York.' It didn't work out that way. — Darin Strauss

When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire. — Darin Strauss

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

I'm really wary of self-help books. — Darin Strauss

After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice. — Darin Strauss

All writers have their own pet commandments. — Darin Strauss

Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what. — Darin Strauss

I've had menial jobs, and 'professional writer' isn't one of them. — Darin Strauss

This empty act could no more be mistaken for a mother's touch than the wind that fills out some dress on a clothesline might be confused with an actual body. — Darin Strauss

I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that. — Darin Strauss

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame. — Darin Strauss

I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high
don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. — Darin Strauss

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists. — Darin Strauss

I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived. — Darin Strauss

Self-hate is rarely unconditional. — Darin Strauss

Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling. — Darin Strauss

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

Things don't go away. They become you. — Darin Strauss

Looking back now, there's something that bothers me abut the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn't Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual's quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine's death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything. — Darin Strauss

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects. — Darin Strauss

By now, the camouflage had become my skin. My friends wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? I certainly didn't want to know. All I wanted was to hold my assumptions to the light, and to watch them sparkle in their facets, as all sham gemstones do. — Darin Strauss

What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one's capacity to register? I slept soundly. — Darin Strauss

Love was now a mild streamlet that advanced in drips around my feet; despite how hard I worked at tenderness, I could not drown in a thing that shallow. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented. — Darin Strauss

My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

Maybe I could have done fifty things to avoid the accident. Left the car in the garage that day. Hurried through a yellow light that I'd stopped at. Gone to the beach instead of mini-golf. Been alone, not talking to friends. But I did all those things, and Celine hadn't done the many things she could have to avoid the accident, either. All the things get done and you regret them and then you accept them because there's nothing else to do. 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. — Darin Strauss

I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the coll mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else. — Darin Strauss

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each. — Darin Strauss

The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun. — Darin Strauss

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing. — Darin Strauss

To a lot of us, literature's eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing - like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture. — Darin Strauss

In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative. — Darin Strauss

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

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy. — Darin Strauss

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

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. — Darin Strauss

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment. — Darin Strauss

The part of the brain that isn't automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feelings: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It's not so much even a type of seriousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by slow degrees. I've never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self hate is rarely unconditional. — Darin Strauss

In fiction classes ... you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence ... But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare ... The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do much noticing. — Darin Strauss

I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable. — Darin Strauss

Society isn't good at dealing with people who have something concrete to feel guilty about or who are dealing with a loss. — Darin Strauss

It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives. — Darin Strauss

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end, as T.S. Eliot somewhere says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours. No freedom from the past, or from the future.
But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

I have come to love you in spite of
Do I want to be loved in spite of? ... Does anyone? — Darin Strauss

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law. — Darin Strauss

At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly. — Darin Strauss

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

Your muscles can tense with hope. — Darin Strauss

What's Denver's feel? I know there're mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city. — Darin Strauss

Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job? — Darin Strauss

Passion and platonic friendliness, often contrary siblings, frequently wear similar faces to hide the great distance between them. — Darin Strauss

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

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. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is. — Darin Strauss

Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh. — Darin Strauss

Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of. — Darin Strauss

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. — Darin Strauss

I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school. — Darin Strauss

I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives. — Darin Strauss

His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren't right even as he couldn't stop presenting them. — Darin Strauss

The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts. — Darin Strauss

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.' — Darin Strauss

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

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

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs. — Darin Strauss