Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.
ADAM JOHNSONIn my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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Once the dust clears you will be standing tall, a champion, a victor. NOTHING will be able to knock you down once you’ve taken the biggest hits this life has to offer, so come on life, BRING IT!
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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.
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But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.
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Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.
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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.
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Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
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I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.
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Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds?
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The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.
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I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners.
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Life brings what it brings. I might be young but I’ve learnt this: prepare for each blind corner with your strongest shoulder dropped, ready to smash through whatever is thrown at you next.
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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
ADAM JOHNSON






