All my life, books have felt alive; some more so than people, or rather, some people. Alive – this has to do with me, I know, and not the books – in a way that some people aren’t. Alive as teachers, alive as minds, alive as imaginative triggers. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
In the story I eventually called ‘Archangel’ and published in 2008, Eudora MacEachern, working as an assistant to a surgeon at a hospital in Archangel, one night finds outside the gates an exhausted and frostbitten soldier crouched over the reins of a pony sleigh carrying the body of another soldier. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
When I’m sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I’ve always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I think the landscape you grow up in probably does mark you in ways you don’t even understand. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I grew up on Cape Cod. We didn’t live right on the water, but I could walk to it and did every day. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I’ve never been to a black-tie thing in my life. I didn’t even go to my prom. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It’s a trait of human nature that I’m particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters. Andrea Barrett Read Quote
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us. Andrea Barrett Read Quote