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Quote by Vivian Gornick

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

Quote by Vivian Gornick

Author

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. more

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“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.”

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“I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.”

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“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.”

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“They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.”

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“It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.”

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“The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.”

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“I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.”

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“Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.”

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“Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!”

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“Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.”

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