Literary Birthday – 18 August – Nicole Krauss

Happy Birthday, Nicole Krauss, born on 18 August 1974.

Nicole Krauss Quotes On Writing

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?
5. I try to write first thing in the morning—I wrote Man Walks into a Room in a year, almost to the day, because I got up and did it every morning. And I use a computer. My handwriting is like a friendly but retarded relative that is only let out occasionally to get a little fresh air and exercise.
6. For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house – it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.
7. What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
8. To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.
9. I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.
10. What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

Nicole Krauss is an American novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her four novels, Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, and Forest Dark. Her writing often explores Jewish history and identity, as well as loneliness, memory, and the limits of language and communication. Her characters often struggle to understand one another and to make sense of their pasts. Her books have been translated into 38 languages. In 2020, Krauss published To Be a Man, a collection of short stories. The book won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Krauss was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind, Brain, and Behavior Institute. She was previously married to author Jonathan Safran Foer. You can find out more about her work on her website.

Source for Image: Author’s website, credit Goni Riskin

by Amanda Patterson
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