There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you’ll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
ADAM JOHNSONI 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.
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.
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Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.
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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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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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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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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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All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.
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Conjure up all the strength you have and drive through whatever it is keeping you on your knees. Build up the strength and your knees may never buckle again!
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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”
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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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[I]n communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
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I thought that, with so much current attention focused on the topic of North Korea, I might share what I think are three books which cast a rare light on the elusive realm of North Korea.
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“A name isn’t a person.” Ga said. “Don’t ever remember someone by their name.
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Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.
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The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.
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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.
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All the human actions we think of as essential to a character – had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.
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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.
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Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings
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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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In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range
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And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.
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The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.
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What good’s a captive without her captor?
ADAM JOHNSON