Nancy Kress Quotes

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

Mark Twain said, 'The right word is to the nearly right word as lightning is to the lightning bug.' Fill your book with lightning.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

So I think I sometimes will put a cliche in and then just pad it out so you're not noticing.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

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

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.