Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Local Souls, is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 June 1947
CountryUnited States of America
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People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things.
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Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.
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You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!
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Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.
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There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.
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Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.
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Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
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I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.
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You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.
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Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.
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Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
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When I grew up, there were locked cabinets in public libraries. You needed parental permission if you were under eighteen. I was let down by the overblown reputations of some hardcore fictional works.
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To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.
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'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.