Saturday Writing Quote

Today, two smart quotes from a novel I enjoyed years back and came across again recently, City of Thieves, by David Benioff (2008), an improbable combination of buddy road trip and historical novel set during the siege of Leningrad. The narrator’s deceased father had been a poet.

“[T]ruth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.”

“It was very odd to speak openly about my father and his work. The words themselves seemed unsafe, as if I were confessing a crime and the authorities might hear. … Still, it was good to talk about him. It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is the past tense.”

— David Benioff, in City of Thieves

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