Chloe Benjamin Quotes

Identity is as absurd and contradictory, I think – and certainly as mutable – as the human brain.

I’ve always been interested in the tension between knowledge and mystery, between science and religion, and the various ways we cope with the unknown. Some of those are productive; some can be attempts to pin down things that are by nature impossible to know.

My favorite writer is Alice Munro. It’s simply amazing how well she captures entire lifetimes in a single short story.

I grew up in San Francisco, and I trained as a ballet dancer until college.

When people ask how I came up with the concept for my second novel, ‘The Immortalists’ – four siblings visit a fortune teller who is rumored to be able to tell anyone the date that they will die – I always wish I had a better answer.

Magic is still a very white-male-dominated field.

I did invent the idea of using lucid dreaming to treat sleep disorders, but I was influenced by many real-life researchers – from forefathers like Freud and Jung to Stephen Laberge and Rosalind Cartwright, who explore lucid dreaming and parasomnias.

I think readers either love or hate nonlinear storytelling, and it’s true that it can be more difficult, both to write and to read.

You can’t have bad things happening to characters simply for shock value; you need to provide context.

We forget that most questions in this world – the ones that really matter – are impossible to answer completely.

Sometimes, we writers find the perfect research material. I can’t overstate how how precious that feels – it’s as though you’re having an intimate conversation with someone who has the key to unlock your project.

I am somebody who has always struggled with uncertainty. And, of course, uncertainty is so core to life. I seek out knowledge to help me deal with that. But I’m also aware that knowledge can be really a double-edged sword.

I think much of my own quest in life is to figure out how best to cope with my own uncertainties.