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Adam Haslett Quotes

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most

That is much of what I think the writer's job is - to slow people down. To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive. Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

Adam Haslett
Jobs, Thinking, People
Source: threeguysonebook.com

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

Adam Haslett
Depression, Thinking, Achievement
Adam Haslett (2002). “You are Not a Stranger Here”, Bantam Dell Publishing Group

Discovery is the joy.

Adam Haslett
Discovery, Joy
Source: threeguysonebook.com

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

Adam Haslett
Bars, Shooting, Indecision
"How To Write a (Good) Sentence" by Adam Haslett, www.slate.com. January 23, 2011.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about. You try not to because it's hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest. So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

Adam Haslett
Character, Trying, Answers
Source: www.bookbrowse.com

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

Adam Haslett
Ends, Court, Deranged

As I see it, my job as a writer isn't to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

Adam Haslett
Jobs, Judging, Reader
Source: www.bookbrowse.com

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

Adam Haslett
Character, Judging, Mind
Source: threeguysonebook.com

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings. If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we've chosen to govern ourselves.

Adam Haslett
Running, Responsibility, Thinking
Source: threeguysonebook.com

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