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" Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting. "
Kathryn Harrison
Me
Life
Kind
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" It's hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don't know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently. "
Kathryn Harrison
Know
Compassion
Family
" 'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one. "
Kathryn Harrison
Right
Slowly
Word
" I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood. "
Kathryn Harrison
Enjoy
Crime
True
" I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn - it's about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall. "
Kathryn Harrison
Feet
Book
Work
" Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father's flocks. "
Kathryn Harrison
Family
Girl
Friends
" I don't care what people think about me. I care what people think about my work. As a young woman, I was so eager to please that I served others' happiness and even their values before my own. "
Kathryn Harrison
Woman
People
Happiness
" Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation. "
Kathryn Harrison
Love
You
Me
" By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years. "
Kathryn Harrison
She
Time
Warrior
" I think in terms of the parents that I had, I sort of drew a bad hand, or bad karma; who knows? And I did have a family that was complicated, with some quite eccentric members. So there was a lot of grist there. "
Kathryn Harrison
Family
Bad
Hand
" I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months. "
Kathryn Harrison
Hours
Wrote
Day
" Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author. "
Kathryn Harrison
Work
Personal
Book
" I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find. "
Kathryn Harrison
Find
Succeed
Admire
" Like all holy figures whose earthly existence separates them from the broad mass of humanity, a saint is a story, and Joan of Arc's is like no other. "
Kathryn Harrison
Other
Story
Like
" For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France. "
Kathryn Harrison
World
Years
Lived
" Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary. "
Kathryn Harrison
Writing
Sane
How
" We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth, if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos - these are the promises art makes. "
Kathryn Harrison
Beauty
Art
Know
" I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household. "
Kathryn Harrison
British
Who
Real
" I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing. "
Kathryn Harrison
Writing
Me
Myself
" I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives. "
Kathryn Harrison
History
People
Change
" I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules. "
Kathryn Harrison
Child
Her
Mother
" How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. "
Kathryn Harrison
Success
Creative
Mental Illness
" I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me. "
Kathryn Harrison
People
Love
Finish
" I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University. "
Kathryn Harrison
University
Good
Good Girl
" I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. "
Kathryn Harrison
Our
Rational
Interested
" How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! "
Kathryn Harrison
Much
Book
Sometimes
" It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty. "
Kathryn Harrison
More
Than
Secrets
" In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other. "
Kathryn Harrison
Going
Back
Biography
" One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other. "
Kathryn Harrison
Process
Listen
Life
" I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right. "
Kathryn Harrison
Right
Never
Chapter
" I admire cool renderings of hot topics. "
Kathryn Harrison
Topics
Hot
Cool