Kay Dubb

“What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

“Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.

All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel