Literary Birthday - 18 August - Nicole Krauss Happy Birthday, Nicole Krauss, born 18 August 1974 Nicole Krauss: 10 Quotes On Writing 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. 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 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. 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? I try to write first thing in the morning—I wrote Man Walks into a Room in a year, almost to the day, because I got up and did it every morning. And I use a computer. My handwriting is like a friendly but retarded relative that is only let out occasionally to get a little fresh air and exercise. For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it. What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web. To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life. I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated. What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: a endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation. Krauss is an American author best known for her three novels Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love and Great House. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages. She is married to author Jonathan Safran Foer.writers-write-creative-blog.posthaven/literary-birthday-18-august-nicole-krauss
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 06:41:54 +0000
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