Garth Greenwell Quotes

Quotes about:

• I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

  Garth Greenwell

  Sex, Book, Titles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

  Garth Greenwell

  Sex, Thinking, Light

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

  Garth Greenwell

  Book, Character, Gay

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Littles

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

  Garth Greenwell

  Writing, Thinking, Inward

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Reflection, Thinking, Patterns

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

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

  Garth Greenwell

  Cutting, Decision, Principles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Important, Literature, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

  Garth Greenwell

  Nonfiction, Hints, Boundaries

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Class, Quality, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Garth Greenwell

  Thinking, Intellectual, Able

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

  Garth Greenwell

  Teacher, School, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

  Garth Greenwell

  School, Opposites, Careers

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

  Garth Greenwell

  Real, Book, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Academic Life, Years, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

  Garth Greenwell

  Teaching, School, Race

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

  Garth Greenwell

  Crazy, Teaching, Reading

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Important, Looks

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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

  Garth Greenwell

  Opera, Conservatory, Left

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: 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

  Ambition, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

  Garth Greenwell

  Important, Opera, Narrative

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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 travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.

  Garth Greenwell

  Hate, Successful, Anxiety

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Musical, Study, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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 a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

  Garth Greenwell

  College, Years, Musician

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Doe, Use, Facts

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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