Top 12 Amy Waldman Quotes

While researching ‘The Submission,’ I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character‘s actions or lines are truer than others.

And as journalists we look for differences – differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We’re very sensitized to difference, but it’s much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It’s strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless – until they aren’t.

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 – confusion even. And I think that’s hard to capture in journalism.

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

I’m kind of a mash-up of taste – Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government‘s approach to Islamic terrorism.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.