Garth Greenwell Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

  Garth Greenwell

  Important, Opera, Narrative

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.

  Garth Greenwell

  Hate, Successful, Anxiety

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

  Garth Greenwell

  Musical, Study, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

  Garth Greenwell

  Crazy, Teaching, Reading

  Source: therumpus.net

  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. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: 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

  Ambition, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

  Garth Greenwell

  Opera, Conservatory, Left

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

  Garth Greenwell

  Thinking, Important, Looks

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable.

  Garth Greenwell

  Book, Gay, Winning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

  Garth Greenwell

  Real, Book, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

  Garth Greenwell

  Book, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

  Garth Greenwell

  Doe, Use, Facts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

  Garth Greenwell

  College, Years, Musician

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

  Garth Greenwell

  Academic Life, Years, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

  Garth Greenwell

  Real, Book, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

  Garth Greenwell

  School, Opposites, Careers

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

  Garth Greenwell

  Teacher, School, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

  Garth Greenwell

  Teaching, School, Race

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

  Garth Greenwell

  Writing, Gay, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

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