Jonathan Dee famous quotes

03-25-2025

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Writing #Junk #Periods
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Kind #Novel #Reader
You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Children #Giving #News
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Nice #Writing #Trying
I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Writing #People #Talent
Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.
-- Jonathan Dee

#New York #Lying #Thinking
Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.
-- Jonathan Dee

#People #Looks #Kenneth
New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.
-- Jonathan Dee

#New York #Synthesis #Subjectivity
The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by a guy who has decided by page 11 that he's fallen in love with a woman, and they're going to murder her husband so they can be together. There's nothing remotely likeable about him, but James M. Cain brings you so far into his head that, at a certain point, you have that uncomfortable but also thrilling sensation of seeing things exactly as he sees it.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Husband #Book #Thinking
You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Being Yourself #Book #Trying
I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Get Better #Novel
I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Believe
In high school, I had a teacher there who was really great to me and with whom I finally dared to admit I wanted to be a writer myself, and we did a project where I wrote terrible, 17-year-old fiction. But I remember a couple of the stories. I'd love it if I could read with pride something that I wrote that long ago, but it hasn't happened yet.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Teacher #Couple #School
I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Block #Writing #People
You see that in the news constantly; done both the right way and the wrong way. The most recent example I can think of, obviously, is Lance Armstrong, who got it all wrong. Who wanted to apologize strategically, instead of abjectly. What got me interested was the repetitive nature of it. There's something so ritualized about it. Then the ritual needs to be reenacted very carefully and pretty frequently - Tiger Woods, and now Manti Te'o and Lance Armstrong, and a little earlier Anthony Weiner or Eliot Spitzer.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Thinking #Done #Apologizing
That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Book #Character #Thinking
A Thousand Pardons began at the beginning. I wanted it to be one continuous, almost breathless kind of story. In order to do that, it's really hard not to begin at the beginning. There's such a chain of consequence to everything that happens to main characters - it's very hard to break it apart and still be able to hold the plot in your head.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Character #Kind #Break
Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Book #Thinking #Break
That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Book #Writing #Perspective
Another big moment in terms of that feeling was David Petraeus: if the director of the CIA can't get away with having a secret relationship, then what hope do you have? It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Feelings #Secret #Moments
I worry that's what people are going to think about me if they kind of go backwards. But if that didn't happen to you, I'll feel better.
-- Jonathan Dee

#Feel Better #Thinking #People

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