Jane Hamilton Quotes

I needed my own territory, and I didn't know how I was going to get it. And so I took my frustrations and plugged them into someone entirely different from me. I wanted to see if I could slip into someone else's skin.

- Jane Hamilton

I'm really glad I had those years working on the orchard alongside my husband.

- Jane Hamilton

A lot of the people of the Midwest came from the Northeast. We're of the same stock. Yet something must have happened when we crossed the Ohio River Valley because I have sensed that there's more of an openness and flexibility of spirit out West.

- Jane Hamilton

In the larger world, tribalism is an enormous problem, as it ever has been: both strength and idiocy borne from belonging.

- Jane Hamilton

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

- Jane Hamilton

Author tours used to have a sense of excitement and pleasure, a sense of occasion. I remember stores having a table with wine and food. It was just a real evening.

- Jane Hamilton

I spent my entire youth being in love with gay men because they were the most interesting and compassionate people I knew.

- Jane Hamilton

I grew up studying dance, taking ballet lessons.

- Jane Hamilton

I experienced unrequited love early.

- Jane Hamilton

'Never change' is the thing that probably high school students have written in each other's yearbooks for time immemorial. They think that command is possible!

- Jane Hamilton

There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.

- Jane Hamilton

All I hope, selfishly, is that there will be real books until the day I draw my last breath.

- Jane Hamilton

As a species, we would not have survived without humor.

- Jane Hamilton

I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.

- Jane Hamilton

I've always broken out in hives when I go into any organized religious situation.

- Jane Hamilton

I don't think that talking to anybody can help you - a writer or a nonwriter. So what do I do in Wisconsin? I don't know. I just slug through it.

- Jane Hamilton

I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.

- Jane Hamilton

I think we're all more alike than we want to believe sometimes.

- Jane Hamilton