Kathryn Harrison Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!
-
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.
-
I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.
-
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.
-
It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty.
-
The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University.
-
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.
-
A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
Rasputin's daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution.
-
I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.