Anthony Doerr Quotes

I would want to travel the world and write about it. To be a famous writer.

The summer I finished my first novel 'Ghana Must Go,' I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lome to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

I like making films about different cultures. I'm interested in things that I've never encountered before. I try to put myself in the audience's position.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

I've never set a book in Europe. I've lived in Europe three times, but somehow or other it wasn't the experience that engaged me in that way.

I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

I tend to write more when I travel.

If you're in a small town somewhere and you can go and visit Paris, you can go to the top of Everest, that's just cool. It's worth it because you become more educated in something.

I'm not going to lie; the most fun of writing these books is just saying, 'Where am I going to write about? Let me go there!'

I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.

I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.

Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.

I'm drawn to a story partly based on the fact that it's something I might not be as familiar with.

I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.

I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.

For me, the experience of being in other culture really set up a longing. When I'm traveling, things seem really sharp. You learn things ten times faster.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.