Judith Thurman Quotes & Sayings

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes. — Judith Thurman

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground. — Judith Thurman

As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors. — Judith Thurman

If you are forced to describe things for someone else, it sharpens your senses. And also your sense of how hard it is to make the translation from the vibrant, multi-faceted world to a sentence that distils it. — Judith Thurman

Insecurity, however, is a luxury on which I never economize. — Judith Thurman

We have one life to live - and one chance to live it in the richest way possible. — Judith Thurman

There's some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It's very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism. — Judith Thurman

And that may be [Helen Gurley] Brown's most enlightened lesson: that sexual autonomy and fulfillment are inseparable from the autonomy and fulfillment that a woman gets from her career. — Judith Thurman

Conservatives like Palin and Reagan and others do seem to love the series, but so do people of all political stripes and backgrounds. I speak about the series' "radiant simplicity." — Judith Thurman

Long before feminism made fashion a guilty pleasure, my first experience of the sisterhood among strangers took place in a communal dressing room. — Judith Thurman

Here was a monument, in fieldstone, to the art of family life. — Judith Thurman

This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists; of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish. — Judith Thurman

Even after several hospitalizations for alcohol and drug-related nervous breakdowns, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay defined sobriety as restricting her daily intake of liquor to a liter and a half of wine. — Judith Thurman

A mad person sees what isn't there; A visionary sees what isn't there yet — Judith Thurman