American - Author | March 20, 1961 -
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.
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It is my conviction that secrets are more costly in the long run than honesty.
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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.
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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.
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For years, the place I really lived - the world I watched, the one I thought and wrote about - was 15th-century France.
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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.
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