Elizabeth Strout Quotes

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Elizabeth Strout

Profession : Author

Birth : January 6, 1956

I got a gerontology certificate a million years ago along with my law degree, so I've been interested in older people for many years. Some people grow up with a lot of kids around, but I just grew up with a lot of old people.

Elizabeth Strout

I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy.

Elizabeth Strout

I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

Elizabeth Strout

The purpose of fiction is not to make people seem nice. What makes anyone think people are nice? Look around you!

Elizabeth Strout

As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor.

Elizabeth Strout

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.

Elizabeth Strout

In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.

Elizabeth Strout

I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.

Elizabeth Strout

I don't think there's anybody I write about who I don't care for deeply in some way, no matter what their behavior is.

Elizabeth Strout

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

Elizabeth Strout

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

Elizabeth Strout

I was a pretty terrible lawyer. A really, really terrible lawyer.

Elizabeth Strout

I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.

Elizabeth Strout

I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging.

Elizabeth Strout

I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

Elizabeth Strout