Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
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The first sentence of a book is a promise.
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A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
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You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
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I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.
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I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
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Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
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Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
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It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
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I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
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The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
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At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
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Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
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I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
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When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.