Quote

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

Nicole Krauss

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nicole Krauss
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: August 18
Author
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Like
Scrapes
Accolades
Bruises
Fade
Fades
Ambition
Left
Ends

More quotes by Nicole Krauss

Image
...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
Nicole Krauss
Image
The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Nicole Krauss
Image
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
Nicole Krauss
Image
We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
Nicole Krauss
Image
What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
Nicole Krauss
Image
I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25)
Nicole Krauss
Image
There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
Nicole Krauss
Image
He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Nicole Krauss
Image
How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?
Nicole Krauss
Image
You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
Nicole Krauss
Image
That powers my desire to write: the sense of how quickly everything on the surface of life can be cut away and you can suddenly be inside the most inner part of the most inner life of a person. What does it feel like there, and what are the regrets and sensations and longings, and what is the music of it?
Nicole Krauss
Image
I'm not immune to the readers' desires. Sometimes they are my own, because I'm a reader, too. The readers' desire to know what really happened and what didn't. To have a glimpse into what's really the author and what isn't. I think we all have that and I wonder about what it means.
Nicole Krauss
Image
I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
Nicole Krauss
Image
To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
Nicole Krauss
Image
For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.
Nicole Krauss
Image
No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.
Nicole Krauss
Image
Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
Nicole Krauss
Image
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.
Nicole Krauss