Everything Takes Longer than You Expect: The Millions Interviews Hannah Gersen

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Writing is gratifying on a daily basis. If I didn’t love doing it, I would have stopped a long time ago.
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Creation Myths: The Millions Interviews Lindsay Hatton

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There’s that myth of the solitary (usually male, usually white) creator devoting his life solely to his work. Writing all day in his Parisian garret or lakeside cottage, and then drinking all night: that kind of thing. Art doesn’t get made this way anymore, at least not by anyone I know. But the myth still persists for some reason, and I enjoy the opportunity to help debunk it whenever possible.
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A Story Made Purely of Feeling: The Millions Interviews Cynthia Ozick

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"I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency."
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Dogs of War: Bronwen Dickey on Pit Bulls

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There is no reason why anyone should live in a place where animal control officers can come to your house and seize your dog and euthanize your dog based on the way it looks when it hasn’t done anything wrong.
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Neither Gift nor Curse: The Millions Interviews Rumaan Alam

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Novels can do whatever the writer asks them to. It may not work, but you can always ask.
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Messing with People’s Expectations: The Millions Interviews Mark Binelli

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I love the idea of grafting details from my life -- a white Italian-American living in 2016, in his 40s -- grafting that onto the life of a black singer born in Cleveland in the late-1920s. Being able to mix all that stuff together was really appealing to me.
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Living in a World with No Future: The Millions Interviews Matthew Neill Null

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We curate ourselves for mass consumption. But real speech tears at the veil. What we say that is not recorded. Drunken confession. Botched jokes. The rejected advance. Campfire at a deer camp. The novel as village gossip.
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Svetlana Alexievich Is No Useful Idiot

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The idea of real, substantive equality is eternal. It’s beautiful. But somehow, in the Russian application of it, it always ends in a river of blood.
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I Was Never Big on Fitting In: The Millions Interviews MariNaomi

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My childhood journals are creepy. I would fly into rages about things. When I’m reading myself as a kid, I think, ugh, maybe that’s why I don’t like kids, because I didn’t like myself as a kid. What a little brat I was.
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Places That Fall Into Ruin: The Millions Interviews Geoff Dyer

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I’m glad I’m capable of disappointment because that shows I still have high hopes for the world.
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The Novel Still Exists: The Millions Interviews Don DeLillo

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I don’t own a cell phone. I was just discussing this with the people I’m traveling with here, people from my publishers. I simply feel more comfortable without these things. But one feels it and sees it. It’s been around me for much of the day today, because the people I’m traveling with, one in particular has trouble with her cell phone. There’s something wrong with it. She doesn’t know who’s trying to get in touch with her, what it is they want to say to her.
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All of This Is Mine: A Conversation with Victor LaValle

The racism underlying “Red Hook" is too parochial to resonate; LaValle’s paraphrase is apt: “I’m being rattled in my cage by my fear of non-whites, and my fear of human insignificance. Here’s a giant octopus head.” LaValle’s assertion of ownership doesn’t supersede Lovecraft, but rather situates him, forcing him out into the violent, messy world.

Going Places No One Else Goes: The Millions Interviews Pamela Erens

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I knew from the start that 'Eleven Hours' would be short, because of the time frame and because there were only so many uterine contractions I could describe without losing my shit.
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Fiction Is a Trudge, Poetry Is a Dance: On Poet Novelists

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The murky area between genres has always been the place where I feel most at home.
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David Unger Is Staying as Far Away From the Facts as Possible

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The writer’s responsibility is to creativity. However, I do think there are some limitations. One has a historical responsibility while addressing atrocities.
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Life Chugs Forward Even When the Worst Has Happened

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The memories, no matter how hard, were still better than the forgetting, because forgetting wiped away the details, the love, the bad meals, the quarrels, the humor and tenderness, the true marrow of it all.
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