Anne Fadiman
Anne Fadiman
Anne Fadimanis an American essayist and reporter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth7 August 1953
CountryUnited States of America
Anne Fadiman quotes about
classes couple discovered stories taught took
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
persona slightly
The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.
daughter children book
My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.
sleep cat bookstores
When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos...
long library belief
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
weather interesting borders
I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.
reading mean cutting
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
sleep writing cities
Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.
people literature way
For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
ice-cream weather errors
It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
girl father writing
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.
old-things waiting psychology
It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.
heroic admire englishmen
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure
daughter baby philosophy
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.