Nicole Krauss Quotes

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I love the creative process, of getting to create your own show or your own movie, whatever it is you want to do, and have the resources to try and make that happen.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

I don't know that any writing comes easily, but I certainly get more immersed in novels. I don't think the routine is any different, but fiction tends to pull me further away from my life. When I'm deep in a novel, I don't pay bills and I walk around in one shoe, drinking two-day old coffee, and calling my kids by the wrong names.

I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.