Tara Westover Quotes

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

I hate set dissertations,--and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception.

I wasn't trained to write non-fiction.

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience.

I come out of an academic background, and I'm aware that what I'm doing is simultaneously research and fiction. I want to meet both those obligations.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

When you have to write a letter, you're automatically put into a state of composure and a kind of formality. You can't help it. So, no, I never once got a letter where someone just popped off at me.

The dry academic tomes I wrote very early in my career were earnest reflections of the research I conducted, the analysis I applied and the conclusions I drew. And they had few readers, mostly other academics. I learned along the way and started including more and more stories in my work.

In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.

I really am a very research-oriented writer.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

The more learned a writer, the more digression beckons him.

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

I don't fall into the physical manifestation of a man of letters. So I guess people assume the scripts are delivered to me under the door.

I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.