Top 70 Vivian Gornick Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Awareness of the self is more acutely at the heart of things than it has ever been before. On the foundation of self-awareness alone rest all our hopes for a new politics, a new society, a revitalized life. If we do not genuinely know ourselves, the void will now, at last, surely rise up to meet us.”

— Vivian Gornick

2. “What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge.”

— Vivian Gornick

3. “You are the instrument of your own illumination.”

— Vivian Gornick

4. “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

— Vivian Gornick

5. “For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.”

— Vivian Gornick

6. “That’s the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.”

— Vivian Gornick

7. “The point of women’s liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, ‘Let me in, damn you, let me in!’ The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.”

— Vivian Gornick

8. “The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement towards it – that counts.”

— Vivian Gornick

9. “Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.”

— Vivian Gornick

10. “What you feel when you’re writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you’re clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.”

— Vivian Gornick

11. “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!”

— Vivian Gornick

12. “What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn’t understand.”

— Vivian Gornick

13. “The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It’s part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.”

— Vivian Gornick

14. “I hated being “Mrs.” from the first second each time. I didn’t know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn’t the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity.”

— Vivian Gornick

15. “The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker – the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience – it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”

— Vivian Gornick

16. “If you don’t leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.”

— Vivian Gornick

17. “I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.”

— Vivian Gornick

18. “Papa’s love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.”

— Vivian Gornick

19. “And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.”

— Vivian Gornick

20. “As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human – the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques – was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”

— Vivian Gornick

21. “The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”

— Vivian Gornick

22. “When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.”

— Vivian Gornick

23. “When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There’s not an ‘I love you’ in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me.”

— Vivian Gornick

24. “Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.”

— Vivian Gornick

25. “New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence – in large quantities – of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.”

— Vivian Gornick

26. “You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

— Vivian Gornick

27. “Everyone longs for expressiveness. That’s why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.”

— Vivian Gornick

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

— Vivian Gornick

29. “We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.”

— Vivian Gornick

30. “When the whole world is writing letters, it’s easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one’s thought is not a value, only a common practice.”

— Vivian Gornick

31. “The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.”

— Vivian Gornick

32. “Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It’s a relationship like any other.”

— Vivian Gornick

33. “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.”

— Vivian Gornick

34. “There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.”

— Vivian Gornick

35. “Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.”

— Vivian Gornick

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

— Vivian Gornick

37. “Man is free only when he is doing what the deepest self likes, and knowing what the deepest self likes, ah! that takes some diving.”

— Vivian Gornick

38. “Women occupy, in great masses, the ‘household tasks’ of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.”

— Vivian Gornick

39. “The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable; whereas in person I am free – obviously! – to sound every which way.”

— Vivian Gornick

40. “Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they’ve been trained to become and hope for the best.”

— Vivian Gornick

41. “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.”

— Vivian Gornick

42. “At the very center of all human life is energy, psychic energy. It is the force of that energy that drives us, that surges continually up in us, that must repeatedly spend and renew itself in us, that must perpetually be reaching for something beyond itself in order to satisfy its own insatiable appetite.”

— Vivian Gornick

43. “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.”

— Vivian Gornick

44. “Very young, I was not able to find myself interesting without intelligent response. I required the company of minds attuned to my own, but no one around gave me back the words I needed to hear.”

— Vivian Gornick

45. “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.”

— Vivian Gornick

46. “Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.”

— Vivian Gornick

47. “She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She.”

— Vivian Gornick

48. “I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did.”

— Vivian Gornick

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

— Vivian Gornick

50. “If she would work he wouldn’t have to keep her in the house. She wouldn’t be crazy, and she could tell him to go to hell. Did you ever think about that, my brilliant daughter? That maybe she’s crazy because she can’t tell him to go to hell? When a woman can’t tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.”

— Vivian Gornick