Kate Zambreno Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes she is struck by how much she goes through life almost unconsciously. She is being swept along. She is a pale ghost. — Kate Zambreno

The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo. — Kate Zambreno

But then other times Maggie is a very bad girl yes a very bad girl because she doesn't care whether they love her anymore. This is when Maggie is filled with HATE. This is when Maggie rebels. Maggie has always had an edge on her that Maggie. It — Kate Zambreno

It is again the season for a woman with a strong identity, the magazine tells Ruth. Could she, did she have it in her to update her visual sense of herself? — Kate Zambreno

If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives. — Kate Zambreno

I am worthy of being read. I mean, one has to be convinced of one's genius. — Kate Zambreno

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice. — Kate Zambreno

What does she want to be? A green girl doesn't like to consider this question. She is waiting around to be discovered just for being herself. — Kate Zambreno

The passivity of the green girl masquerades as politeness — Kate Zambreno

When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia. — Kate Zambreno

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it. — Kate Zambreno

The hope in literature is that we are allowed to be imperfect, to write of our imperfection, without being overly critiqued for being unlikeable. — Kate Zambreno

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed. — Kate Zambreno

Patriarchy is having the power to name. — Kate Zambreno

For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage. — Kate Zambreno

On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them. — Kate Zambreno

I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis. — Kate Zambreno

What is it with young women and exclamation points and smiley faces! So afraid of appearing somber, always wanting to appear light and happy and sparkling, even when they are dying inside. Not ever being able to escape the mask that smiles. She wants to write, really write someday. But she is not fully formed. So she does not write. Not really. Unless attempting to live is a form of attempting to write. The agony of becoming. This is what she experiences. The young girl. She would like to be someone, anyone else. She wants, vaguely, to be something more than she is. But she does not know what that is, or how one goes about doing such a thing. — Kate Zambreno

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women. — Kate Zambreno

We live in such fear of puncturing the moment, of forgetting our lines. — Kate Zambreno

My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it. — Kate Zambreno

I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission. — Kate Zambreno

People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress. — Kate Zambreno

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon. — Kate Zambreno

I'm just too lazy. I wish I could be someone that has wild affairs - all of my favorite nonfiction novels are about these wild affairs and postmarital agonistes - but to be honest, I'm someone that doesn't deal well with instability. — Kate Zambreno

I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance. — Kate Zambreno

Agnes always wanted to go out. Out was better than in. In was inside, in was interior, in was introspection. — Kate Zambreno

She likes the bad boys the ones that are bad for her. Maggie is SELF-DESTRUCTIVE. She has the love instinct and the death instinct and they are in an eternal cage match inside her head. This — Kate Zambreno

The most important part of an introduction always occurs in one's absence. — Kate Zambreno

It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath. — Kate Zambreno

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it. — Kate Zambreno

I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route. — Kate Zambreno

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism. — Kate Zambreno

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged. — Kate Zambreno

I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged. — Kate Zambreno

People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature. — Kate Zambreno

I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that's the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr - excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual - or if formal books will emerge at all, if that's not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I'm excited by the possibility. — Kate Zambreno

She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely. — Kate Zambreno

Ruth loved color so much she rarely wore any. Except on her face. — Kate Zambreno

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect. — Kate Zambreno

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots. — Kate Zambreno

Sometimes she narrates her actions inside her head in third-person. Does that make her a writer or a woman? — Kate Zambreno

I am home because I am a writer, but sometimes, when I'm not productive (productivity: the expectations of capitalism), I feel like a terrible housewife, or a sick person. — Kate Zambreno

I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful! — Kate Zambreno

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well. — Kate Zambreno

When I was writing Green Girl,I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and she's very dismissive of the young girl. She writes about the girl as being from this space of bad faith and blankness. I'm more interested in a messy space. — Kate Zambreno

All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work. — Kate Zambreno

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order
pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. — Kate Zambreno

One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself. — Kate Zambreno

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside. — Kate Zambreno

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature." — Kate Zambreno

I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions. — Kate Zambreno

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature. — Kate Zambreno

How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman. — Kate Zambreno

The green girl necessarily pines for the past, because the present is too uncomfortable to be present in and the future, unimaginable. The need to long, to desire that which she cannot have, that which has eluded her, because she deceives herself that it was this person, this chance, where she would have found happiness. — Kate Zambreno