Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I have done some short pieces that are not horror.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

All good novelists have bad memories.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.