I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.
From Kathryn Harrison
Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, I've never had the sense I was 'making up' a character. It feels more like watching people reveal themselves, ever more deeply, more intimately.
For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.
I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right.
I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I've discovered that I don't have the journalism nose for blood.
When I was eleven, my mother gave me Robert K. Massie's 'Nicholas and Alexandra.' It was the first 'grownup' book I read, and I loved it.
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