Kate Zambreno Quotes

Quotes about:

• I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Thinking, Keys

  Source: therumpus.net

  8 Copy quote

• I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that's the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr - excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual - or if formal books will emerge at all, if that's not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I'm excited by the possibility.

  Kate Zambreno

  Book, Writing, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.

  Kate Zambreno

  Book, Character, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

  Kate Zambreno

  Philosophy, Writing, Thinking

  "The naming is a political act, the writing is a political act, a revolt against disappearance". Interview With Noah Charney, logger.believermag.com. November 3, 2014.

  5 Copy quote

• I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Mad, Wife

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Getting Older, Our Society

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I am worthy of being read. I mean, one has to be convinced of one's genius.

  Kate Zambreno

  Mean, Genius, Worthy

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Imperfection, Literature

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.

  Kate Zambreno

  Notebook, Years, Agitation

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Boring, Orderly

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Important, Slim

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I am home because I am a writer, but sometimes, when I'm not productive (productivity: the expectations of capitalism), I feel like a terrible housewife, or a sick person.

  Kate Zambreno

  Home, Sick, Expectations

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."

  Kate Zambreno

  Girl, Writing, Greatness

  "The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Kate Zambreno". Interview with Gina Frangello, therumpus.net. November 18, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

• For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.

  Kate Zambreno

  Years, Feelings, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Nerves, Genius

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Patriarchy is having the power to name.

  Kate Zambreno

  Names, Patriarchy

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.

  Kate Zambreno

  Girl, Men, Groups

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Narrative, Rhetoric

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Canon, Memoir

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!

  Kate Zambreno

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  "Why Don't You Like Me? writers Tamara Faith Berger and Kate Zambreno in conversation". Interview With Tamara Faith Berger, logger.believermag.com. November 1, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

  Kate Zambreno

  Female, Literature, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

  Kate Zambreno

  Character, Fiction, Autobiography

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

  Kate Zambreno

  Childhood, Remember, Reason

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.

  Kate Zambreno

  Girl, Writing, Past

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

  Kate Zambreno

  Mean, Class, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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