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" 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
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" It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty. "
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Than
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" 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
" 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. "
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Back
Biography
" 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. "
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Determination
Object
" 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
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Time
Warrior
" I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story. "
Kathryn Harrison
Early
Twenties
Story
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
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More
Never
People
" I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. "
Kathryn Harrison
Our
Rational
Interested
" 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 wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months. "
Kathryn Harrison
Hours
Wrote
Day
" 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
" 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 love any book that makes my family seem almost normal. "
Kathryn Harrison
Normal
Love
Family
" 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
" 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 am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn't discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, and you certainly don't discuss people's sex lives. "
Kathryn Harrison
Myself
People
I Am
" 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 remember seeing my father only twice as a child for brief visits. As I grew up, I invented a father who was larger than life - stronger, smarter, more handsome, and even holier than other men. "
Kathryn Harrison
Men
Life
Child
" Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary. "
Kathryn Harrison
Writing
Sane
How
" 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
" '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
" 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
" Looking at the Obamas, they have a lot to manage with their children and having Michelle go out and have everybody comment on what she was wearing, what it means. I think you have to create a pretty large private world to live in. "
Kathryn Harrison
Looking
Children
Live
" 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 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
" A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading. "
Kathryn Harrison
Dwell
Relationships
Worth
" 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