Latest Garth Greenwell Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

  Garth Greenwell

  Mean, Exercise, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

  Garth Greenwell

  New York, Night, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

  Art, Training, Singing

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Garth Greenwell

  Teacher, School, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

  Real, Book, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

• I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

  Garth Greenwell

  Book, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

  Garth Greenwell

  Voice, Mars, Consciousness

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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

• 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