Karen Russell Quotes

I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it's 'War and Peace' everyday.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.

The last few years I've had to force myself to go out and be more involved the world because I can get a bit more cerebral and escape into characters and the world of characters. But now I guess I escape into stories about 'Wilfred.'

A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people; it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

I definitely have a lot of different layers inside of me.

I like to play non-cardboard characters. I try and bring out the many complex layers in the personality of the characters I play.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart!

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.

This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.

Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

Once upon a time' These are the most magical words our world has ever known and the gateway to the greatest stories ever told. They're an immediate calling to anyone who hears them-a calling into a world where everyone is welcome and anything can happen. Mice can become men, maids can become princesses, and they can teach valuable lessons in the process.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.