Quotes by Garth Greenwell - Page 1

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.
Garth Greenwell /
Teacher
School
Way
Copy Quote
Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.
Garth Greenwell /
Beautiful
Bulgaria
Country
Copy Quote
I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.
Garth Greenwell /
Conservatory
Left
Opera
Copy Quote
I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.
Garth Greenwell /
Book
Responsibility
Thinking
Copy Quote
History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.
Garth Greenwell /
Blind
Invisible
People
Copy Quote
I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.
Garth Greenwell /
Cutting
Decision
Principles
Copy Quote
I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.
Garth Greenwell /
Important
Narrative
Opera
Copy Quote
I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.
Garth Greenwell /
Doe
Gay
Writing
Copy Quote
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 /
Form
Important
Literature
Copy Quote
I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.
Garth Greenwell /
Able
Intellectual
Thinking
Copy Quote
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 /
Book
Kind
Real
Copy Quote
I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.
Garth Greenwell /
Boundaries
Hints
Nonfiction
Copy Quote
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 /
Language
Musical
Study
Copy Quote
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
Copy Quote
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 /
Exercise
Mean
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Patterns
Reflection
Thinking
Copy Quote
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
Singing
Training
Copy Quote
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
Facts
Use
Copy Quote
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 /
Consciousness
Mars
Voice
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Ambition
Self
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Gay
White
Writing
Copy Quote
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 /
Race
School
Teaching
Copy Quote
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 /
Quality
Class
Way
Copy Quote
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 /
Arrangements
Moments
Possibility
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Firsts
Months
World
Copy Quote
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 /
Book
Real
Teaching
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Book
Character
Gay
Copy Quote
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 /
Important
Looks
Thinking
Copy Quote
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 /
Careers
Opposites
School
Copy Quote
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
Want
Years
Copy Quote
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 /
Anxiety
Hate
Successful
Copy Quote
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 /
Littles
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Bed
Order
Thinking
Copy Quote
A Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marías sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.
Garth Greenwell /
Genius
Heart
White
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Inward
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
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
Musician
Years
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Drama
Thinking
Weather
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Book
Gay
Winning
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Light
Sex
Thinking
Copy Quote
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
Reading
Teaching
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Book
Sex
Titles
Copy Quote
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.
Garth Greenwell /
Teacher
Book
School
Copy Quote
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
People
Thinking
Copy Quote

Related Authors

Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
Theodore Roosevelt
26Th U.s. President
Wednesday, Oct 27, 1858
Monday, Jan 06, 1919
Joe Biden
Vice President Of The United States
Friday, Nov 20, 1942
Thomas Aquinas
Priest
Tuesday, Jan 28, 1225
Wednesday, Mar 07, 1274
Heraclitus
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poet
Wednesday, Oct 21, 1772
Friday, Jul 25, 1834
Kobe Bryant
Basketball Player
Wednesday, Aug 23, 1978
George Orwell
Novelist
Thursday, Jun 25, 1903
Saturday, Jan 21, 1950
Paulo Coelho
Lyricist
Sunday, Aug 24, 1947
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Groucho Marx
Comedian
Thursday, Oct 02, 1890
Friday, Aug 19, 1977
Stephen Hawking
Physicist
Thursday, Jan 08, 1942
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980
Thomas Jefferson
3Rd US President
Saturday, Apr 13, 1743
Tuesday, Jul 04, 1826

View All Quotes

Top Authors

Thomas Sowell
Economist
Monday, Jun 30, 1930
Jordan Peterson
Psychologist
Napoleon Hill
Author
Friday, Oct 26, 1883
Sunday, Nov 08, 1970
George Carlin
Comedian
Wednesday, May 12, 1937
Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
Sun Tzu
Strategist
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Donald Trump
45Th President Of The United States
Friday, Jun 14, 1946
Winston Churchill
Former Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom
Monday, Nov 30, 1874
Sunday, Jan 24, 1965
Groucho Marx
Comedian
Thursday, Oct 02, 1890
Friday, Aug 19, 1977
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
William Blake
Poet
Monday, Nov 28, 1757
Sunday, Aug 12, 1827
Kanye West
Songwriter
Wednesday, Jun 08, 1977
Thursday, Jun 04, 2015
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Tuesday, Jan 15, 1929
Thursday, Apr 04, 1968
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Wednesday, Mar 15, 1933
Steve Jobs
Entrepreneur
Thursday, Feb 24, 1955
Wednesday, Oct 05, 2011
Plato
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970

View All Authors

Garth Greenwell Quotes - Page 1

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page