A Quote by Ismail Kadare
If I manage to write something that I consider good and valuable in a particular place, that spot automatically has a special aura for me. In Albania, there are two cities where I have written the majority of my work: Gjirokaster, my home city, and Tirana.
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Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities.
I wanted to make a home that was similar to the kind of home that my mother made. To be able to create something like that in my adopted city, New York City, one of the toughest cities on the planet, is really special.
It is home. The Twin Cities are home and [Ames] is home. It’s definitely always a place that’s going to be very special to me.
There are two places that are hard to write about. A place like Britain, England in particular, which has been written about by everybody, and then the place that's never been written about.
You want to have the experience. As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. You got on a film sometimes and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not. We're good at saying what other people have written, but for the majority of it, that's about it, comedians aside. It's all in the writing. Whether that's dialogue or character, or whatever, it doesn't matter. As long as they've done something special, than you can do something special.
I have learned a valuable lesson from my own mother: Good nutrition starts in the home. In my home, it takes some negotiating: eat a vegetable and you may get a special treat. It seems to work for my five children.
But a lot of my training can be done in Aston - a lot of the hard work, so to speak. But a new atmosphere, a new place, and it's good for me because I didn't want to get stuck in one spot, so coming home is good, back and forth, you know, where my roots are.
Walter Benjamin talks about art losing its original "aura" in an age of mechanical reproduction. In writing memoir, we're taking something that happened in a particular moment and meant something at that time, and we're trying to capture it to mass reproduce it for readers. So of course something is lost. And when we edit that material, we're getting even further from that aura, but toward something else that is potentially vital.
Every time I'm in a foreign place and a different city, I'm always asking around to say, OK, well, what's special here in this particular place? What makes these people move here and why?
There are a lot of rules in cities that were designed to protect a particular incumbent, but not to move a city's constituents, a city's citizens, and the city itself, forward. And that's a problem.
I consider the West Coast home, but Milwaukee is still a special place.
"A Tale of Three Cities" is a tribute to our parents' generation, who escaped from city to city in search of their loved ones and in search of a place to build a better home. The story is set during the turbulent war years in China in the '40s and '50s.
The moments of grace usually give us more than one good thing we can do, and we do well if we manage a pretty good batting average. ... It is an opportunity that God sews into the fabric of a routine situations - It is a chance to do something creative, something helpful, something healing, something that makes one unmarked spot in the world better off for our having been there.
I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.
Yes, I do consider the city I will be in when I decide which dress to wear. I get a little edgier in more metropolitan cities and a little fluffier in Southern cities. Having said that, I chose a lavender cupcake of a dress for the start of the book parties in New York City by Rafael Cennamo.
All cities have one key resource: the special abilities of the people who live in them. You just have to find out what they are. In the Australian city of Adelaide, for example, which is overshadowed by Sydney and Melbourne, I discovered a number of experts in the penal system. I advised them to work with these special skills.
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