Nicole Krauss Quotes

I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that’s sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.

I’m the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don’t allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.

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.

What about you? Are you happiest and saddest right now that you’ve ever been?” “Of course I am.” “Why?” “Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

If I had a camera,’ I said, ‘I’d take a picture of you every day. That way I’d remember how you looked every single day of your life.

So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like to think the world wasn’t ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn’t ready for the world. I’ve always arrived too late for my life.

I’m very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

…we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

…after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

It’s strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.

. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he’d be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] – to teach your child to live without you.

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.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?

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.

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized. Without them, we’d be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you’re left with is your ambition.

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.

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?

…larger than life…I’ve never understood that expression. What’s larger than life?

At the end, all that’s left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.