Karen Thompson Walker Quotes

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

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?

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

But the past is long, and the future is short.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

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.

It's really hard to get a book published, even a good book, but the better the book is the better chance it has of eventually catching someone's attention.

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.

Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words.

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.

Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.

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 was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.

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.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

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.

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.

Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.

Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

The only thing you have to do in this life is die, " said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.

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.

He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man.

We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain.