Garth Greenwell quotes

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing. (Garth Greenwell)

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Garth Greenwell

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Garth Greenwell

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

Garth Greenwell

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Garth Greenwell

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

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

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

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 to bed something like a search for order, or any other element of your sensibility, however much you'd like to.

Garth Greenwell

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

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. (Garth Greenwell)

My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

Garth Greenwell

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

Garth Greenwell

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

Garth Greenwell

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

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 a musician also shaped me as a writer.

Garth Greenwell

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

Garth Greenwell

The whole point of art, for me, is to give us tools to explore feelings or situations or dilemmas that defeat our other ways of making meaning. When a situation is so vertiginous, so ethically complex, so emotionally fraught, that I feel like I'm staring into an abyss-that's when I feel moved to make art, when I feel I need the peculiar tools of fiction to figure out what I think. I mean, to inhabit my bewilderment. I think art is the realm in which we can give full rein to the ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt that we often feel we have to suppress in other kinds of expression-in our political speech, say. I think an ability to dwell in ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt is a central virtue of humanness. I think it's crucial to any thinking that might adequately capture the complexity of reality.

Garth Greenwell