Words matter. These are the best Karen Joy Fowler Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I’ve had to write what I’ve wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.
I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
I learned how to comport myself among trolls, elves, hobbits or goblins. I learned that a friend can be lost to greed and avarice. I learned that solving riddles may be as important a survival skill as bowmanship. I know how to talk to a dragon, and that it’s best not to.
I do read all my work aloud as I’m working – this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband’s retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I’m alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.
I had a very loyal cult-like following, I feel. And I don’t mean to complain about that.
Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history – high school and college courses – a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You’re left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you’re actually living through.
The smart way to build a literary career is you create an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what they are going to get. That’s the smart way to build a career, but not the fun way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That’s an option, too.
Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
If I’m made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as – if we’d been very, very good – she read the next chapter of ‘The Hobbit’ aloud to us.
My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It’s not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.
I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I’m often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
If we see a sad rain, it doesn’t mean the rain is sad, but it means we see it. That’s an easily dismissible kind of projection. But what I’m struggling to say, is that we take that rain in through our own hearts and emotions and senses and skin, and all those filters have an impact.
All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
