Top 13 Antonya Nelson Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Antonya Nelson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that yo

I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn’t work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
Antonya Nelson
The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical.
Antonya Nelson
I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.
Antonya Nelson
I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can’t stop until I’ve found an answer.
Antonya Nelson
I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It’s weird; I’m always taking notes about fiction when I’m listening to people talk about craft.
Antonya Nelson
I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I’ve returned every summer since I was born.
Antonya Nelson
Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy – how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.
Antonya Nelson
Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it’s not impossible to know someone who’s like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.
Antonya Nelson
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who’ve become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master’s thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn’t find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn’t read Faulkner.
Antonya Nelson
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
Antonya Nelson
I want to earn a reader’s capacity to be moved.
Antonya Nelson
Finding pleasure in revision is the thing I would most strongly advise to people. It’s not something I did as a younger writer; I learned it over time.
Antonya Nelson
Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.
Antonya Nelson