Alexander Chee Quotes

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.

Whenever I go out with other married couples, I like to bring along a single crackhead. Just to spice things up.

This is impossible to predict. War may break out unexpectedly.

Politics is like waking up in the morning. You never know whose head you'll find on the pillow.

Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.

War always takes you by surprise.

You’re still waiting for the running and the screaming, aren’t you?

You always got to be prepared but you never know for what.

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

When you choose a show you really don't know where it's going to go. Sometimes things let you down and sometimes things just surprise you and fulfill you way more than you thought.

I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.

Real life seems to have no plots.

With two laps to go then the action will begin, unless this is the action, which it is.

War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.

Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory. The odds favored dramatic results.

Where will I be five years from now? I delight in not knowing. That's one of the greatest things about life its wonderful surprises.

A writer's job is to cultivate what can go wrong. You're always looking for that dramatic arc of where things can fail.

Life is a game played on us while we are playing other games.

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.