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Lore Segal Biography

Lore Segal (born March 9, 1928), née Lore Groszmann, is an American novelist, translator, teacher, and author of children's books, currently living in New York City. Her book, Shakespeare's Kitchen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

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Lore Segal Quotes

Franz Kafka is a huge influence, more than the Grimms. To allow yourself to get into the coal bucket and fly to the sky. . . we learned that from Kafka, that you can have a thought and make a body of it in this way.

Influence, Grimms, Huge, Franz, Sky, Allow

As soon as you move through the hospital doors you've removed yourself from real life. From the world we know. It's an alien world. Just enter those gates and you are in alien territory.

Hospital, Move, Moving, Real, World

Gustave Flaubert said, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi. " It is not possible to write something you are not, but to have a new form, with a different hair color and a new body. . . I do very little of that. That's why I keep bringing up the same people. I haven't given myself a hard time about it. But I can't make six new characters instead of one.

Bovary, Character, Hard Times, Instead, Write, Writing

It's hard for us sophisticates to believe, but the people my parents worked for were good people. They were socialists of the heart. They were Scottish upper class. I don't think they had political theories in the way my lefty friends in New York do but they did all the things that socialists do. My mother was the Jewish cook from Vienna and they would say, "Come and have dinner with us. " I spent weekends with them. Who does that? This is Utopia.

Believe, Heart, Mother, Vienna, Weekends, Worked

My idea in Half the Kingdom was simply, or not so simply perhaps, that medical science has given us twenty extra years of life. Those twenty extra years - one is grateful for them, one is happy, but they also give you ten or twenty years more of losing your faculties. That is actually the origin of my notion. Once you live longer than you're supposed to live, things go dreadfully wrong. But nevertheless, you're not dead.

Giving, Grateful, Idea, Kingdom, Losing, Simply

I dare say you believe I'm going to die. I bet you don't believe you're going to die. You know it, but you don't believe it. Imaginatively, I think we find it impossible to believe we don't exist.

Believe, Dare, Imaginatively, Impossible, Know, Thinking

Did the nineteenth-century novelists create more generously than we do now? In a general reading of contemporary work, do you see a lot of new and different characters, or is it the same character who is a stand-in for the writer? And it's interesting enough, but it's a weakness I think. We are much more self-revealing and less able to produce new people over and over again.

Character, Generously, Reading, Same, Think, Thinking

I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

Children, Father, Point, Says, Thinking, Wow

I'm very moved and very excited. And it just seems to me here are houses and trees and streets that feel so different from New York. I feel very attached to London; I love it.

Attached, Different, House, Moved, Tree, Trees

I read on a Kindle. I must be of the opinion that the new way to read is a pretty good way to read. It's a new way. Those of us who like the smell of books get upset but nevertheless this is the way we're going.

Book, Opinion, Read, Smell, Upset

Once you start on an idea it proliferates in itself.

Idea, Proliferates, Start

Story has a mind of its own and tells things sometimes it might have preferred us not to know. Stories operate like dreams; both veil what is to be uncovered, neither is capable of the coverup.

Dream, Mind, Sometimes, Stories, Know, Tells

First book was handwritten, then the printing press, now we've got our Kindles. To be able to push a button and a dictionary comes up. And then, at my age, that I can make the letters any size I want, and that I can carry all of William Shakespeare, all of Gogol, all of Franz Kafka in my handbag? You've got to love it.

Age, Book, Button, Carry, Handwritten, Printing

I've often tried to describe how memory works. I've suggested this to students, and told them to close their eyes and try to remember what I look like. Then I ask them if they remember what I look like. But when you open your eyes you will be surprised how different what you thought I looked like is to what I actually look like. Because the imagination is a different raw material from actual vision. Memory is very different from the thing itself.

Close, Eye, Imagination, Memories, Memory

Lore Segal Biography

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