146 Quotes by Alexander Chee

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

I’ve been told it’s hard to write about singing. I didn’t realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you...

Reading teaches me the answers to the problems I haven’t had yet, or to problems I didn’t even know how to describe. And when I feel less alone with what troubles me, it is easier to find solutions. A book to me is like a friend, a shelter, advice, an argument with someone who cares enough to argue with me for a better answer than the one we both already have. Books aren’t just a door to another world-each book is part of a door to the whole world, a door that always has more behind it.

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.

And the gods did not kill for hubris-for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.

Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale the sky and the backs of angels, or to fall through the earth to where they rest. And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still cannot imagine or believe in except, sometimes, in song.

What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

51. What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?