Garth Greenwell Quotes

Quotes about:

• I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

  Garth Greenwell

  Sex, Book, Titles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

  Garth Greenwell

  Reflection, Thinking, Patterns

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

  Garth Greenwell

  Sex, Thinking, Light

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

  Garth Greenwell

  Book, Character, Gay

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

  Garth Greenwell

  Writing, Thinking, Littles

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

  Garth Greenwell

  Writing, Thinking, Inward

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

  Garth Greenwell

  Cutting, Decision, Principles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

  Garth Greenwell

  Important, Literature, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

  Garth Greenwell

  Nonfiction, Hints, Boundaries

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

  Garth Greenwell

  Class, Quality, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

  Garth Greenwell

  Thinking, Intellectual, Able

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

  Garth Greenwell

  Voice, Mars, Consciousness

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think I'm qualified to answer questions about happiness. But I guess I'd say that I don't think you ever get to put to bed something like a search for order, or any other element of your sensibility, however much you'd like to.

  Garth Greenwell

  Thinking, Order, Bed

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

  Garth Greenwell

  Months, Firsts, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

  Garth Greenwell

  Beautiful, Country, Bulgaria

  Source: therumpus.net

  9 Copy quote

• I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.

  Garth Greenwell

  Drama, Thinking, Weather

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If my novel gets any attention in Bulgaria, it will be as a scandal: a book about a teacher at a famous school and his relationship with a prostitute. I doubt very much it will be evaluated on its merits as literature. If Bulgarian were the book's only language, that would be painful and limiting to me as a writer. Since my book also exists in English - where it isn't scandalous at all - I feel comfortable with the possibility of scandal.

  Garth Greenwell

  Teacher, Book, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• A Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marías sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.

  Garth Greenwell

  Heart, White, Genius

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

  Garth Greenwell

  Moments, Possibility, Arrangements

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

  Garth Greenwell

  Writing, Gay, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

  Garth Greenwell

  Ambition, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

  Garth Greenwell

  People, Blind, Invisible

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

  Garth Greenwell

  New York, Night, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

  Garth Greenwell

  Art, Training, Singing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

  Garth Greenwell

  Mean, Exercise, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin