Jennifer Haigh Quotes

The story of my family ... changes with the teller.

Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools, and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy.

It was the oldest friends who mattered most. With each passing year, Paulette realized this more deeply. She thought of her borther Roy, retired to Arizona, to golf with other men who were also - she loathed the expression - senior citizens. Roy had arrived in Phoenix with an entire life behind him, a career, a marriage; to his new friends he'd always be old.

I spent some time, six months or so, ruminating about the characters before I sat down to write 'Faith'.

I have written my whole life. I remember writing as a small child.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

Destiny, she'd learned, was written in the heavens; a person couldn't take what the universe didn't wish to give.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.

But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.

Her skin was as pale as milk. She must live on vanilla ice cream, Dinah thought; rounds of Camembert, crème anglaise.

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives ... he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind - the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she'd gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she'd made the whole thing up.

Sooner or later you have to decide what you believe. It was a thing I'd always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

I have great respect for writers who are humble, whose language allows the reader to see the story but doesn't get in the way. Language is a window, and if the window is clean, you shouldn't be aware you're looking through glass.

Working in a prison, is, to my mind, similar in ways to working in a coal mine. It's going to scare away a lot of people.

When they touched it was like touching her own body. From childhood they had been the same height; their arms and legs and hands were still perfectly congruent. Only the centers of them were different, aching, fascinated, every part of them heated to the same temperature as the sun warmed pond.

I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.