Kathryn Harrison Quotes

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.

I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters.

A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.

Scars are stories, history written on the body

I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood.

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

If complete enlightenment demands relinquishing the self, then complete enlightenment implies the acceptance of mortality. Not that there isn't more to being enlightened than accepting that our lives are brief and end when we did. But I do think it's a requirement.

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

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

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.

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.

My days are as long as despair can make them.

The road always stretches endlessly ahead and behind us, so that we are out of time as well as out of place.

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

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!

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.

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.

I admire cool renderings of hot topics.

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

I can't work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing.

For me, writing is inseparable from thinking. I could say the entire undertaking is a vast cerebral construct against my demons. It's the thing that I love. It's my identity.

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.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

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