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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

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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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable. "

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

" '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

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

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 love any book that makes my family seem almost normal. "

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

" 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 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

" 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

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

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

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

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

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

Kathryn Harrison

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

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 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

" 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

" 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

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

Kathryn Harrison

" 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

" 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

" 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