A Quote by Alexander Chee
I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
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My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.
Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.
More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.
When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.
I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now.
It [going from mini-series to series] was never even discussed because it [The Starter Wife] was, you know, an adaptation of a novel. And we - the mini-series encompassed the whole novel. And so it was always going to be a finite sort of event. And then I imagine when people started to really respond to the show and then we got ten Emmy nominations, USA sort of said, "Oh, I think maybe we have something here."
I'll be in a series for three or four episodes, but then I'll be off the series, and downtime, as an actor, is a little more than most people understand. Most of the time you're just sitting around taking coffee with friends.
Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody's head.
I think that there's something really special about doing a series. You get inside the skin of that character 'cause it's such a long time.
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.
But really, there are no coincidences. Coincidences are just other people's choices, plans you don't know about.
It's always difficult to say goodbye, especially when one has spent a long time - literally years, in the case of a series - inside a character or two, suffering and celebrating with them.
Today I said to the calculus students, "I know, you're looking at this series and you don't see what I'm warning you about. You look and it and you think, 'I trust this series. I would take candy from this series. I would get in a car with this series.' But I'm going to warn you, this series is out to get you. Always remember: The harmonic series diverges. Never forget it."
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