96 Quotes by Darin Strauss

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.

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?

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.

The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.

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.

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

After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

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.