Best 42 quotes of Kate Zambreno on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.

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.

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.

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

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

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

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

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.

I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.

I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.

It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.

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.

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.

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

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.

People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.

People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.

She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.

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.

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.

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.

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

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

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

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.

Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection.

And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don’t love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he’s horrible to her, and that’s what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille’s ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you’re writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don’t typically get with the ‘whore’ or the ‘slut’ or the sexual girl.

Ruth loved color so much she rarely wore any. Except on her face.

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional… I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet.

The green girl necessarily pines for the past, because the present is too uncomfortable to be present in and the future, unimaginable. The need to long, to desire that which she cannot have, that which has eluded her, because she deceives herself that it was this person, this chance, where she would have found happiness.