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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I admire cool renderings of hot topics. "

" 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. "

" 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

Life

Kind

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

" 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. "

" 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

Love

You

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

Never

People

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

Kathryn Harrison

Than

Secrets