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The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable.

Kate Zambreno

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Kate Zambreno
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Mount Prospect
Illinois
Write
Without
Unlikeable
Writing
Overly
Imperfection
Imperfect
Allowed
Literature
Hope

More quotes by Kate Zambreno

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The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not great literature.
Kate Zambreno
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I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.
Kate Zambreno
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If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.
Kate Zambreno
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I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!
Kate Zambreno
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I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.
Kate Zambreno
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People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature.
Kate Zambreno
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For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.
Kate Zambreno
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I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.
Kate Zambreno
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I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
Kate Zambreno
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I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons I always felt alienated, outside.
Kate Zambreno
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I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.
Kate Zambreno
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On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.
Kate Zambreno
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How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.
Kate Zambreno
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I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.
Kate Zambreno
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She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.
Kate Zambreno
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It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.
Kate Zambreno
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I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.
Kate Zambreno
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I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.
Kate Zambreno
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I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.
Kate Zambreno
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One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.
Kate Zambreno