“I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.” — Anthony Doerr Quote

“I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.”

“The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.”

“My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.”

“I missed the boat when I was doing Late Night.”

“My grandad was a prawn fisherman who built his own boat.”

“Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.”