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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep. — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth. — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
“[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness -… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
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… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let… — Garth Greenwell Copy Share Image
![“[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don’t see.” quote by Garth Greenwell](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/431/garth-greenwell-14165_codes_l-ike-poems-cruising-carves-privacy-out_265401.jpg)
