Karen Russell Quotes

I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers.

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

A story invites both writer and reader into a kind of superficial ease: we want to slide along, pleasingly entertained, lost in the fictional dream.

Obviously people read the books in order to be entertained.

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.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I like to read dramatic novels and I absolutely love magazines.

I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.

I don't generally read a lot of fiction.

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

I love fiction, you know? I find it fascinating. So when film really does go into fictional places, that's the most exciting for me. And when the fiction is about the person rather than about the place, that's even more exciting.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

I write books that will make 10 or 12 hours disappear, and hopefully they'll resonate with you for a few days, where you'll remember the characters and the story. That suits me fine; I am happy with that.

Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

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.'

As far as what readers can expect with 'Maybe Someday,' I'm not the type of writer who writes to educate or inform my readers. I simply write to entertain them.

I can be so blown away by story lines.

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.