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.

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.

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

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.

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

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?

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

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

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.

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

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

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.

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

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've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

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.

My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.

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

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

Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.