Leni Zumas Quotes

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.

When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

There's relief in white space for the reader.