Nicole Krauss Quotes & Sayings

“To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.”

“To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.”

“The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.”

“The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory - and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place - the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.”

“When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.”

“I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.”

“I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.”

“I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.”

“I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.”

“I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world - things connect.”