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" The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley. "

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" 'The Danish Girl' was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me. "

David Ebershoff

Always

" I'm not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day... I'm the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am. "

David Ebershoff

Time

Day

" History devours, but at times it resurrects. Some lives must wait for history to catch up. "

David Ebershoff

History

Some

" If the Latterday Saints had not abandoned plural marriage, they would have remained a fringe religion and would never have moved into mainstream American culture. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints thrives. It is one of the fastest growing religions in the country and is the most successful American-born religion. "

" We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion. "

" Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation. "

" I first read 'The Scarlet Letter' when I was fifteen. In it, I found a familiar vision of religious intolerance to the one around me. I grew up in the 1980s, when televangelists, with their fluffed up hair and their tears, self-righteously denounced all kinds of sinners, reserving a special, full-throated enthusiasm for gay people. "

David Ebershoff

People

Hair

" In some ways, writing a novel, especially a novel set in the past and about characters who once lived, is about amassing enough details and arranging them properly in order to offer the reader a verisimilitude that satisfies his or her curiosity about the story at hand. "

" I usually don't throw around the word 'fabulous,' but how else to describe buildings decorated with mirrored water dragons, serpents tiled in colored glass, and hundreds - no, thousands, no, tens of thousands - of gold-leaf Buddhas? Luang Prabang has more than 47,000 residents, but its Buddha population must be ten times that. "

" When I see someone interesting on the subway - the lady with her new Bible or the delivery guy holding down a dozen Mylar balloons - my mind goes in two different directions. Where are they coming from? And where are they going? "

" I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside. "

" Sometimes when I travel, I like to close my eyes and imagine visiting during another era. "

David Ebershoff

Imagine

Travel

" Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn't a single marriage that couldn't provide enough narrative arc for a novel. "

David Ebershoff

Enough

Change

" Since I was a kid, I feel most confident when I'm reading. "

" Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free. "

" An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting. "

" I love to read history; at its best, it is an art. "