35 Quotes by Jonathan Dee

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.