Quotes from Anthony Marra

No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.

There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.

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.

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.

You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.

It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

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.

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.

After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.

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.

Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.

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.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.

A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.

Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.