87 Quotes by Adam Johnson

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Nonc looks out on the city. It looks like one of those end-times Bible paintings where everything is large and impressive, but when you look close, in all the corners, some major shit is befalling people.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

This feeling of being in proximity to something that’s lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now.

This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn’t understand what they meant for a long, long time.

Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn’t acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that “take” was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.