Author

A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.

From Anita Shreve

I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.

From Anita Shreve

I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.

From Anita Shreve

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.

From Anita Shreve

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?

From Anita Shreve

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

From Anita Shreve

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.

From Anita Shreve

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

From Anita Shreve

I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will haunt me for days.

From Anita Shreve

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.

From Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve

Notable Quotes

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