Words matter. These are the best Nicole Krauss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory – and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place – the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.
That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?
My first novel, ‘Man Walks Into a Room,’ is about a man who’s lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it’s about how we create a coherent sense of self.
I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
When the word ‘nostalgia’ was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology – not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.
I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook – this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.
I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.
I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world – things connect.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.
You can’t imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.
