Karen Bender Quotes
Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
Quotes to Explore
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'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
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Let us democratise knowledge. Let us universalise justice. Together, let us globalise compassion!
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Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
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All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.
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The excitement of the fans in Montreal, especially in the playoffs, I don't think you can get that anywhere else. For a hockey player, I kind of wish everyone could go through that and experience what it is to play there. It's very unique.
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You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
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Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
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I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
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I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
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There's no story that breaks, including a five-alarm fire in Brooklyn, that I don't wish I were covering.
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Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
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Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world.
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I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.
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I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary.
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I wish I didn't have to perform 'Iron Man' every night.
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Some people seem to see compassion as being mushy.
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As far as I know, no tapes exist from my years at 'T.J.'s.' I wish they did.
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I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this; because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults, or remove prejudices which are imbibed against him.
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I have two younger brothers, and I know my parents have spoken to them about driving and interacting with police. They didn't have those conversations with me, but they did have conversations about being exceptional black people.
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I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.
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My mother was very involved with me. And we had a dialogue constantly. And it was like an umbilical cord. As long as the words were flowing back and forth we were connected and feeding each other. And I probably grew up very afraid of losing that connection.
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Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.
