Kathryn Harrison

“I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right.”

“How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!”

“I love any book that makes my family seem almost normal.”

“I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn - it's about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall.”

“Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you're in charge of running a country, you're under scrutiny all the time. That's a trap.”

“I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University.”

“Looking at the Obamas, they have a lot to manage with their children and having Michelle go out and have everybody comment on what she was wearing, what it means. I think you have to create a pretty large private world to live in.”

“In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.”

“'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.”

“Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.”

“For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.”

“How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few.”

“I have at last admitted that not only was I angry with my mother, but, in fact, I wanted to destroy her as a child. And I was so concerned to be a woman who was different from my mother that I had this vast architecture of rules.”

“It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty.”

“By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years.”

“I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find.”

“I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household.”

“I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.”

“I am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn't discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, and you certainly don't discuss people's sex lives.”

“The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.”