Words matter. These are the best Andrea Barrett Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.
Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There’s a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don’t have the disease feel safer.
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I’ve been really lucky to know her. She’s a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
I’ve never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn’t even go to my prom.
By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That’s actually when I started writing, although I didn’t think of it then as something I might someday do.
I’ve always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.
I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don’t even understand.
I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn’t live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every day.
All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive – this has to do with me, I know, and not the books – in a way that some people aren’t. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers.