21+ Molly Antopol Quotes On Creative, Insightful And Witty

Molly Antopol is an American fiction writer. She is the author of the short story collection The UnAmericans, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Molly Antopol on love, creative, insightful.

Top 10 Molly Antopol Quotes

1. Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.
2. It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.
3. There's something interesting about being really intimate and familiar with Israel, but still being American - that really thin piece of glass between me and my experiences.

Molly Antopol Famous Quotes And Sayings

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all. — Molly Antopol

People are going to bash you. You get rejected. It's hard. I don't really feel like that's my place as the teacher. I think the most important thing is to figure out what they're trying to do and turn them onto writers who are doing similar stuff. I think that's something I can do more than anything else: get them to be big readers. — Molly Antopol

I felt like if I could get the epiphany out of the way in my drafting process, through my eighth or tenth draft, then that can just be part of how I've assembled the character, and then we can move on and move forward with it. In general, I don't ever want to feel smarter than my characters, because I just feel like that's not a great way to write a story. — Molly Antopol

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph. — Molly Antopol

So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters. — Molly Antopol

So in the drafting process, whenever I would discover something about what my character wanted or didn't want, I immediately just wanted my character to admit to that so I could get to the next, more interesting level in the story. — Molly Antopol

But what I realized when I was looking back at them was that no matter how different they are, they're still coming from me, and they're still coming from my brain and my set of obsessions. I think that no matter how different I tried to make them, there were just these certain questions that I just kept circling back to as I was writing. I think they were the ones I was really swept up in in that decade. — Molly Antopol

Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging. — Molly Antopol

For so many of my characters, they were political in their own countries and they risked their lives for certain political beliefs that they had, only to be brought to America where they're not treated like Americans - they're just not really treated like anything. — Molly Antopol

It really made me nervous to write about it [Holocaust] and to approach it, because I was nervous about how to do it respectfully, and I was also thinking about how I could add something new to something that had already been so explored. — Molly Antopol

I knew that I was writing for an American audience and that if I sold foreign rights, they would retranslate the book to make it make sense to that language. But one thing that was really important to me was not to italicize any of the words in the languages that were in the stories, because I feel like those foreign words felt just as important and integral to the story as everything else, so I wanted it all to just exist as its own thing. — Molly Antopol

So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet. — Molly Antopol

With the Israel stories, it was for me the most surprising way the title would fit in. I kept thinking about, for a lot of my Israeli characters, what it was like to inherit such a complicated and symbiotic relationship to America and to feel how tangled that is, and it's nothing that they chose to do themselves. — Molly Antopol

With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it — Molly Antopol

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world. — Molly Antopol

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley. — Molly Antopol

The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y. — Molly Antopol

Years ago I read an interview with Paula Fox in which she said that in writing, truth is just as important as story. Reading that interview was the first time I really understood that there's no point in trying to impress people with my cleverness when I can just try to write honestly about what matters most to me. — Molly Antopol

Life Lessons by Molly Antopol

Molly Antopol's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and connecting with people from different backgrounds. Through her stories, she teaches us to be open to different perspectives and to be more compassionate to those around us. Her writing also encourages us to take a closer look at our own lives and to reflect on the impact our decisions have on our relationships and our communities.