Karen Russell Quotes - Page 3

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.