Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her three novels Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Loveand Great House. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best American Short Stories 2008. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages. In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth18 August 1974
CountryUnited States of America
And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
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.
It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love...Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.
Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory.
I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.
I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.