Words matter. These are the best Karen Thompson Walker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That’s what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.
I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I’m picking up is what’s in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.
In general, I think I’m quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
I feel like writing a book there’s always a version in your head that’s an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it’s amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it’s one of the most satisfying parts of writing.
There’s a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling was part of my life. My experience of earthquakes has always been more the fear of them, or the possibility.
Sometimes I think I might not have written ‘The Age of Miracles’ if I hadn’t grown up in California, if I hadn’t been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.
I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.
If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I’m haunted by it.
I’m an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.
I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the president, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that’s not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan’s amazing debut novel, ‘The Lifeboat,’ when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It’s such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.
Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination… a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there’s still time to influence how that future will play out.
