Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I think there's nothing more wonderful than using fiction to reflect real-world cultural ideas.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

I never really am concerned about the political landscape of the day when I'm writing because no matter what it is, it will change. By the time my stories come out, it will have changed. So I never think much about that.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.