Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
believe civilization clothes
We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.
alone letting
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
block format requires sentence
When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
chechnya founded linked north tourism travel website wonders
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
people regularly taken visited
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
frightened joys research
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
barack copies couple days few learned left obama politics prose sign stopped
I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
close covers finished
I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
characters
To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.
beloved hard met work
It's hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved - I don't think I've ever met someone who has encountered 'Calvin and Hobbes' without falling for them.
chairs crowded discuss dozen folding joined staircase table youngest
I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.
anymore brain days fiction good knew nights perform retail short sleeping spent stories time written
I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
affair beauty college culture history love natural remarkable rugged russia since studying
Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
argued artistic aware bill comic consumer disposable eclipsed expression medium newspaper
Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.