Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.

Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Whenever I start a new book, I think, 'This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.' Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

I like short stories.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.

I read a lot of fiction.

There's always a bit of fiction in everything that I write.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.