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Vivian Gornick Quotes

Critic

Vivian Gornick, born on June 14, 1935, is an American literary critic and writer known for her profound social insights and delicate portrayal of the female experience.

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Famous Vivian Gornick Quotes

“In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.”

Writing Self Memoir Writing Craft Writing Memoir Memoir As Literature

Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Source: The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“Those of us who crave the expressive but can’t shake off the melancholy walk the street.”

Writing Walking Solitude

Book:Approaching Eye Level

Source: Approaching Eye Level

“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.”

World Writing Persons Self Humanity Rooms Company Virtue Written Loneliness Solitude Conversation Empty Letters Assuming Prime Telephones My Thoughts Imaginative Immediacy Empty Rooms

Author:Vivian Gornick

“When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.”

Thinking World Writing Whole Stories Values Easy Hours Common Practice Alive Solitude Quiet Letters Whole World Thoughtful Lap Inner Life

Author:Vivian Gornick

“I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing.”

Writing Streets Organization Activism Activist

Author:Vivian Gornick

“What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.”

Ifs Thinking Feels Writing Sentences Relief Clarifying

Author:Vivian Gornick

“You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.”

Writing Humans Persons Human Beings

Author:Vivian Gornick

“They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.”

Writing Humans Wells May Human Relations Human Relationships

Author:Vivian Gornick

“I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.”

Knows Want Feels Writing Stories Fiction Models Treats Memoir Narrative Agendas Storyteller

Author:Vivian Gornick

“Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are reading.* How obvious the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all.”

Needs Giving Writing Has Beens Seems Reading Fun Information Obvious Readiness

Author:Vivian Gornick

“A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

“The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.”

World Writing Movement Poet Novelists Engagement

Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Source: The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

Writing Matter Able Happened What Matters

Author:Vivian Gornick

About the Author

Born: June 14, 1935
Known for: Critic
Quotes: 81

Books & Sources

Essays in feminismRelated source material

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal NarrativeRelated source material

Women in Science: Then and NowRelated source material

Fierce AttachmentsRelated source material

Approaching Eye LevelRelated source material

The Odd Woman and the CityRelated source material

Fierce Attachments: A MemoirRelated source material

Voldsomme båndRelated source material

Apegos ferocesRelated source material

The Men in My LifeRelated source material

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