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

Garth Greenwell

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Garth Greenwell
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: March 19
Novelist
Poet
Louisville
Kentucky
Language
Studying
Didn
Background
Music
Backgrounds
Always
Musical
Late
Second
Started
Study
Fourteen

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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.
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I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.
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I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.
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History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.
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I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.
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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.
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I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.
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My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.
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I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.
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My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.
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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.
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Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.
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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.
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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.
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I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.
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I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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