Best 42 quotes of Garth Greenwell on MyQuotes

Garth Greenwell

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    Garth Greenwell

    I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    If my novel gets any attention in Bulgaria, it will be as a scandal: a book about a teacher at a famous school and his relationship with a prostitute. I doubt very much it will be evaluated on its merits as literature. If Bulgarian were the book's only language, that would be painful and limiting to me as a writer. Since my book also exists in English - where it isn't scandalous at all - I feel comfortable with the possibility of scandal.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    Garth Greenwell

    I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

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

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

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    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.

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    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. 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.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    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.

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    Garth Greenwell

    I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seemed vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.

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    Garth Greenwell

    I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seems vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.

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    Garth Greenwell

    the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside.