Susan Shreve Quotes

United States, Novelist
May 2, 1939

Susan Shreve is an American novelist, memoirist, and children's book author. She has published fourteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of My Life (2012), and a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood (2007). She has also published thirty books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes (2011), and co-edited five anthologies. Shreve founded the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980, where she teaches fiction writing. She is the co-chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She lives in Washington, DC.

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

Susan Shreve
Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.

Susan Shreve
- School
- Child
- Complainers

My mother listened to everything I said, carefully - not that what I said was particularly interesting, but I was her daughter.

Susan Shreve
- Daughter
- Said
- Listened
My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children.

Susan Shreve
- Children
- Mother
- Teach
As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.

Susan Shreve
- Child
- Writer
- Disappear
As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency.

Susan Shreve
- Life
- Stories
- Solitary
I hate to confess that I would love to have all of my children in Washington - and at the same time, they've been all over the place, and my heart of hearts, I believe that freedom is wonderful.

Susan Shreve