Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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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I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
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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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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
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Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.
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It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.
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When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.
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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
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What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
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There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
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People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
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I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
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There is some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what's in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that too. ... If I could teach you one thing, Preston, that's it. Think about what's coming at you later on.
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At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.