Jim Shepard Quotes

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

Christy has not been given a fair shake. She has not been identified as a competent premier.

The etiquette of blurbs means it's not hard to not blurb something (if it's not by a friend, or student): everyone knows how many books you're deluged with. You can just say you never got to it.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it seems like it would make a good story.