Andrea Barrett

“It was through Peter that she first understood that the world existed before her, without her. For a few days she could…

— Andrea Barrett

I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn't live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every…

— Andrea Barrett

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out…

— Andrea Barrett

By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English…

— Andrea Barrett

I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don't even understand.

— Andrea Barrett

It's hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all…

— Andrea Barrett

I wanted to be a scientist. My undergraduate degree is in biology, and I really did think I might go off and…

— Andrea Barrett

I've never known a writer who didn't feel ill at ease in the world. We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's…

— Andrea Barrett

Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.

— Andrea Barrett

“He thought back but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator, thought away . From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books…

— Andrea Barrett

I'm not adopted. But that longing and that sense of absence ... are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my…

— Andrea Barrett

Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working…

— Andrea Barrett

“Slowly, I began to relearn something I’d once grasped but had lost sight of: that emotion—that central element of fiction—derives not from…

— Andrea Barrett

I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would…

— Andrea Barrett

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

— Andrea Barrett

The cure until the late 1940s, when there was an antibiotic discovered for tuberculosis, was basically rest. It was fresh, cold air,…

— Andrea Barrett

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to…

— Andrea Barrett

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I…

— Andrea Barrett

I've never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn't even go to my prom.

— Andrea Barrett

Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated…

— Andrea Barrett

“He will break it to her gently, he thinks. A hint, at first; a few more suggestions in letters over the coming…

— Andrea Barrett

“..one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior…

— Andrea Barrett

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be...any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one…

— Andrea Barrett

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I…

— Andrea Barrett

I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers…

— Andrea Barrett