I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.
BEN H. WINTERSThere is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
More Ben H. Winters Quotes
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We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.
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There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions – including literal slavery – all over the world.
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We forget the conditions – not only in slavery – but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today’s incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things.
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I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.
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We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.
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One thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump – this candidate first, president-elect, and now president – is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.
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Even after he was elected, and even now, it still feels impossible. It felt like we had fallen into this wormhole of history.
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It is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away.
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I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone’s mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.
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Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
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There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
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A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.
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Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.
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History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.
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One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.
BEN H. WINTERS