Darin Strauss Quotes

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Darin Strauss

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 1, 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darin Strauss