Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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 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
" Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution. "
Kathryn Harrison
Revolution
Royal
She
" 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
" Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately. "
Kathryn Harrison
More
Never
People
" 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
" Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you're in charge of running a country, you're under scrutiny all the time. That's a trap. "
Kathryn Harrison
You
Time
Running
" When I was eleven, my mother gave me Robert K. Massie's 'Nicholas and Alexandra.' It was the first 'grownup' book I read, and I loved it. "
Kathryn Harrison
Book
Mother
Loved
" I love any book that makes my family seem almost normal. "
Kathryn Harrison
Normal
Love
Family
" It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty. "
Kathryn Harrison
More
Than
Secrets
" 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 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
" 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
" I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision. "
Kathryn Harrison
Lion
Daughter
Eyes
" 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
" 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
" The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history. "
Kathryn Harrison
History
Years
Military
" I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. "
Kathryn Harrison
Our
Rational
Interested
" The power of 'Madame Bovary' stems from Flaubert's determination to render each object of his scrutiny exactly as it looks, or sounds or smells or feels or tastes. "
Kathryn Harrison
Power
Determination
Object
" A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading. "
Kathryn Harrison
Dwell
Relationships
Worth
" 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
" I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months. "
Kathryn Harrison
Hours
Wrote
Day
" 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 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
" 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 reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story. "
Kathryn Harrison
Early
Twenties
Story
" 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
" 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
" Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary. "
Kathryn Harrison
Writing
Sane
How
" 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