Alexander Chee Quotes

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.

I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I was always a writer, by which I mean I was always scribbling away, doing something with pen and paper.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

I can't emphasize enough how much of a writer I am.

I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

I think all writers have a style, a particular voice and rhythm that you have to find.

I love great writing.

I don't really read Stephen King - I just can't read scary things because it stays with me too long - but I truly liked his memoir of the craft of writing.

Sloane Crosley and David Sedaris are two of my favorite writers; they're the kind of writers who make you feel like, 'I can do this. I want to do this.'

I never thought I was very good at developing material. I grew up at the BBC where they sent you scripts.

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.