Leni Zumas quotes
-
“It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.”
-- Leni Zumas -
-
“I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.”
-- Leni Zumas -
“Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.”
-- Leni Zumas -
“I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.”
-- Leni Zumas -
“In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“There's relief in white space for the reader.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.”
-- Leni Zumas -
“So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.”
-- Leni Zumas -
“In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“I started reading contemporary fiction in college or right after college. It wasn't as if I was steeped in experimental minimalism when I was twelve or something. I was reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
#Reading Quotes #College Quotes #Contemporary Fiction Quotes
-
“In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
-
“Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
-
“Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.”
-- Leni ZumasSource : Source: therumpus.net
You may also like:
-
Deb Olin Unferth
Short story writer -
Kevin Sampsell
Writer -
Lidia Yuknavitch
Author -
Noy Holland
Writer -
Sabina Murray
Screenwriter -
Yvonne Zipter
Poet