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" 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

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" Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary. "

Kathryn Harrison

" I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" 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

" 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

" It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I admire cool renderings of hot topics. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history. "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" 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

" How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! "

Kathryn Harrison

" 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