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" 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
Book
Mother
Loved
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters. "
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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. "
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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. "
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" I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months. "
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" The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history. "
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" 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 reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story. "
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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 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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" 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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" I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood. "
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" '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. "
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" Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution. "
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" 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 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
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Real
" Writing is how I stay sane. It's completely necessary. "
Kathryn Harrison
Writing
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How
" I admire cool renderings of hot topics. "
Kathryn Harrison
Topics
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" 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 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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" How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! "
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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. "
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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. "
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" 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. "
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" I've always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. "
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