Anthony Doerr Quotes

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he's dead, then maybe he was a great man.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine!

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Maybe everyone lives forever. Or maybe, like in the animated movie 'Coco,' only those whose stories get told by the living definitely do. It takes a story worth telling.

Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

You can't write if you don't read.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.

I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Our deaths become a part of our lives in the sense that with our deaths we give something to those who are left behind, as we have given our lives to them.

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.

As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

It's wonderful being an author and having so many kids enjoying my books. That's always been my dream job, and I feel very lucky to be able to do it.