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

Kathryn Harrison

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University. "

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" A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading. "

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" 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 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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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. "

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" I admire cool renderings of hot topics. "

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" I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story. "

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

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. "

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" I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. "

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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

Kathryn Harrison

" I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters. "

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

Kathryn Harrison