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Books Quotes by Nicole Krauss

38 Books quotes by Nicole Krauss

All Books quotes Nicole Krauss’s page

Nicole Krauss likens novels to houses, places we live in for long stretches as both reader and writer. She trusts readers to decide what a story means, rather than being told, and notes each new book reflects a different version of herself. Her quotes also celebrate how literature lets us step fully into another situation, feeling the world from a fresh perspective.

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“I spent the morning reading Ovid. I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for…

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I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you…

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

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To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs…

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I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

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My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second…

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Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not…

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I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and…

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The book Forest Dark wants to provoke questions about what is reality and why are we so given to believe that reality…

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“Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though he hadn’t yet published a book of poems he seemed to…

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“The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the…

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I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw…

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“When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before…

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I'm not immune to the readers' desires. Sometimes they are my own, because I'm a reader, too. The readers' desire to know…

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I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust…

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You're looking for ways always as the writer to bring readers into intimacy, you with them with you. Photos can sometimes do…

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“The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought…

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“I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's…

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“When my sons asked the reason for my trip, I said that I needed to conduct research for my book. What is…

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“Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not…

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“I, too, like to read. Once a month, I go to the local branch. For myself, I pick a novel and, for…

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I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score…

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One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.

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If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader…

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No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of…

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

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

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I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral…

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What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to…

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When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made…

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I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table.…

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“I don't know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each…

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The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

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Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather…

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At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the…

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the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands…

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For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels,…

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Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in…

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More by Nicole Krauss

“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly…

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a…

When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my…

“There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and…

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

“The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a…

“The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that…

I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader…

Mom?" I said. She turned. "Can I talk to you about something?" "Of course, darling. Come here." I took a few steps into the…

In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But…

Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew…

“She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes…

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can…

“Doesn’t part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us…

“I knew how to raise my own child, what did he think it was, a game of Scrabble or Monopoly, there are no rules,…