All you need to do to be original is to consult deeply in yourself.—Marilynne Robinson

Photo of Marilynne Robinson by Jamie Clifford.

Wise, compassionate, generous, patient, intellectually rigorous, with a fine sense of humor and a clear sense of self—that’s how I’d describe Marilynne Robinson, based on the keynote address she gave at the 2011 AROHO Retreat, which is the source of this quote, and a brief conversation I had with her at the retreat.

When she was growing up, she said in her address, she was taught that you could make yourself into someone whose company you enjoy and give yourself a mind you wanted to live with. She learned to value solitude.

When she’s not writing or teaching, she reads. She likes to read science and theology; she likes to read primary sources. She does not hold herself to a work ethic but writes when she has something to say. Her novels are character and voice driven. She advised us to “trust your own mind.”

Robinson is the author of three critically acclaimed novels—Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Home won the Orange Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Housekeeping, her first novel, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

She’s also an acclaimed essayist. Her latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, was published in hardcover March 2012 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and in paperback January 2013 by Picador.

She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City.

• Read Marcia Meier’s essay, “Marilynne Robinson at AROHO: Access Your Deep Mind.”
• Read a Fall 2008 Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson.
• Read “Marilynne Robinson: By the Book,” a March 7, 2013 New York Times interview.
• Read “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson,” by Mark O’Connell in the May 30, 2012 New Yorker.
• Buy and read her books.

See more quotes about writing here.

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