What good’s a captive without her captor?
ADAM JOHNSONThere, 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.
More Adam Johnson Quotes
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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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Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything
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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.
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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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Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!
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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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Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.
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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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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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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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Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
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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 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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For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.
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The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.
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A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.
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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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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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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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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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. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .
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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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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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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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Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.
ADAM JOHNSON