Teddy Wayne quotes

People talk about Obama in the same way 12-year-olds talk about Bieber, and speculate about what he and Michelle are like behind closed doors the same way those 12-year-olds wonder what Justin and Selena are like.
-- Teddy Wayne

#People #Wonder

I write the books I want to read. I'm interested in seeing what happens with this book in the marketplace.
-- Teddy Wayne

#Book #Writing

I think that most successful artists - not always, but a lot of them, in any field - have business savvy as well and have some sense of marketing acumen. I think the key is to be good enough at it that it doesn't overwhelm your aesthetic interests, but have just enough that you make smart decisions.
-- Teddy Wayne

#Smart #Successful #Artist

We spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our loved ones, and yet we don't have that many novels on the subject. We have far more novels about families bickering at Thanksgiving and not enough about the day before Thanksgiving at the office. If we lived in, say, Romania, maybe a workplace job might not be as important to the cultural discussion. But we live in America, where work is crucially important and capitalism drives everything we do.
-- Teddy Wayne

#Office #Important #Workplace

For each of my novels, I've had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in - Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard - and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process).
-- Teddy Wayne

#Wall #Writing #World

I've never gone through the paces that writing textbooks sometimes recommend, such as writing out a character's biography, or determining what his favorite food is, or most traumatic memory, etc. - that's always seemed like a fraudulent way of assembling a fictional person.
-- Teddy Wayne

#Memories #Character #Writing

It's through the voice that I tend to figure out the character (and through dialogue that I come to understand other characters).
-- Teddy Wayne

#Character #Voice #Figures

Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where we are going?'. Answer: 'If you didn't know any geography, people would think you were an American, and you wouldn't be able to put them right because you wouldn't know where they live.'

Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

Often we want people to pray for us and help us, but we always defeat our object when we look too much to them and lean upon them. The true secret of union is for both to look upon God, and in the act of looking past themselves to Him they are unconsciously united.

There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

Court-virtues bear, like gems, the highest rate, Born where Heav'n influence scarce can penetrate. In life's low vale, the soil the virtues like, They please as beauties, here as wonders strike.