American - Author | 1969 -
So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.
Amy Waldman
CompetitionNameDesignAmerican
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.
GovernmentWorldAmericanTerrorism
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.
CharacterGreatImaginationWriting
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.
MotivationalKnowledgeCommunity
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.
DifferencesLookWriteCulturesMuch
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.
TodayWordsSlaveryBibleChristian
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?
PastThinkQuestionsYouCountry
I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'
ThinkingWantSittingWriteYears
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.
New YorkPeopleThoughtNewBirth
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.
LifeChildrenBeginningParentsEnd
I wasted years worrying about what other people thought.
PeopleThoughtYearsWastedWorrying
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
ImaginationResearchStorySkills
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Amy Waldman quotes