Darin Strauss Quotes

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Darin Strauss

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 1, 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

Darin Strauss

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

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

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

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

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