Quotes from Anthony Doerr

I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull.

Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake.

You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

My goals aren't really commercial success.

My mom is a science teacher in high school, and one of my brothers works in optics at Bell Labs, and so I was always surrounded by it.

If our biological imperative is to pass our genes to the next generation, our moral imperative has to be to try, before we become corpses, to leave them a planet they can survive on.

The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.

Fridays after school, especially when the weather was lousy, Mom would take me to the library. She'd let me check out whatever I wanted, and I checked out a lot.

We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.

My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

I have always felt that it's a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.

We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we're in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

Every artist wants an audience, and it's incredible to me how books take on a life of their own and reach people whom you could never meet. That's what got me interested in writing in the first place.