Rob Roberge Quotes

#1. It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.

Rob Roberge

#2. There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.

Rob Roberge

#3. Some of the biggest challenges were, page after page, standing naked in front of the reader.

Rob Roberge

#4. I like the fact that second person puts the reader in the story. It makes them, whether they like it or not, complicit in the action.

Rob Roberge

#5. I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.

Rob Roberge

#6. For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.

Rob Roberge

#7. My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.

Rob Roberge

#8. You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.

Rob Roberge

#9. I wasn't doing much work when I was using and drinking. I have friends who did it (work), but I wasn't one of those people.

Rob Roberge

#10. One of the things I love most about second person is that it reminds the reader that they are reading a text. It doesn't allow them to drift into the story and not notice that they are reading a book - a book that has an author.

Rob Roberge

#11. I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

Rob Roberge

#12. Stay away from the Zombies.

Rob Roberge

#13. The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

Rob Roberge

#14. I like a text that reminds the reader its a text sometimes.

Rob Roberge

#15. I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

Rob Roberge

#16. The least trusted testimony in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. We are simply not good reporters of facts that happen to us, or in front of us. But that's not the same as knowingly lying.

Rob Roberge

#17. I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

Rob Roberge

#18. I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.

Rob Roberge