American - Novelist | November 26, 1943 -
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
Marilynne Robinson
TruthKnowledgePoetrySayingMyth
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
PeopleWritingFeelYouCreateKnow
The Bible for me is holy writ. It's a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist.
I AmMeBibleStraightforwardHoly
When I lecture, under almost all circumstances, I write a new lecture for the occasion. It helps me think. It helps me make demands of myself that I would not otherwise make.
MyselfMeThinkNewCircumstances
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.
HistorySchoolResearchYouCreate
When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.
EyesWritingSomeoneSeeingI Can
I really enjoyed my kids. They were good boys, you know, and interesting. And they didn't wear me out.
GoodMeInterestingYouKnowOut
A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.
GreatReligionChristianDoneOwn
I like to read in my own house, in any of the rooms I always mean to paint or otherwise improve and never do. Every detail is so familiar to me that it makes almost no claim on my attention.
MeDetailAttentionHouseMy Own
I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.
TimeLightPreparationBookReading
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
ScienceEyesMeQuestionsEnough
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
EducationMeWritingDirectionYears
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Marilynne Robinson quotes