Looking at the Obamas, they have a lot to manage with their children and having Michelle go out and have everybody comment on what she was wearing, what it means. I think you have to create a pretty large private world to live in. – Kathryn Harrison
The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years’ War and of history. – Kathryn Harrison
I remember seeing my father only twice as a child for brief visits. As I grew up, I invented a father who was larger than life – stronger, smarter, more handsome, and even holier than other men. – Kathryn Harrison
The Russian revolution is one of history’s car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable. – Kathryn Harrison
I was raised by maternal grandparents who were born in 1890 and 1899, respectively. They were British subjects; George V was the cousin of the tsar. The Romanovs were very real in their household. – Kathryn Harrison
I am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn’t discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don’t discuss politics, you don’t discuss religion, and you certainly don’t discuss people’s sex lives. – Kathryn Harrison
I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn’t change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives. – Kathryn Harrison
I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A’s. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University. – Kathryn Harrison
I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he’d had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision. – Kathryn Harrison
I used to enjoy reading true crime, but I’ve discovered that I don’t have the journalism nose for blood. – Kathryn Harrison
It’s hard for me not to have a great deal of compassion for the last Romanov family because, really, I don’t know if a politically savvy ruler would have been able to make the situation turn out much differently. – Kathryn Harrison
I can’t work out much about myself or what I see in the world around me unless I do it through writing. – Kathryn Harrison
I think in terms of the parents that I had, I sort of drew a bad hand, or bad karma; who knows? And I did have a family that was complicated, with some quite eccentric members. So there was a lot of grist there. – Kathryn Harrison
For years, the place I really lived – the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about – was 15th-century France. – 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. – Kathryn Harrison
Rasputin’s daughter understands the revolution. She would have been an outsider, a spectator in the royal family and to the revolution. – Kathryn Harrison
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. – Kathryn Harrison
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. – Kathryn Harrison
Lives that are so conspicuous have a claustrophobic feeling. Once you’re in charge of running a country, you’re under scrutiny all the time. That’s a trap. – Kathryn Harrison
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. – Kathryn Harrison
I don’t care what people think about me. I care what people think about my work. As a young woman, I was so eager to please that I served others’ happiness and even their values before my own. – Kathryn Harrison
I’ve always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives. – Kathryn Harrison
