Garth Greenwell Quotes

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

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.

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.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

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.

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.

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.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

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.

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.

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

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.

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

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.

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.

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.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

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.

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

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.

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.

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.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

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.

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside.