Alison Lurie

Alison Stewart Lurie (September 3, 1926 – December 3, 2020) was an American novelist and academic. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.

Quotes

• Children who seem unlikely to do well ... sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, "too clever for her own good," but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team.
  • "No One Asked Me to Write a Novel", The New York Times (June 6, 1982), sec. 7, p. 13

• You come to a certain age and you know there is no event that can ruin your life. Or completely change it.
  • From an interview with Sally Vincent, as cited in "What you always knew", The Guardian (17 September 2005)