What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do,… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“He's not from here, that's the thing," Cub said. "Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know ? I've been thinking about that.… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you -… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. "That was a luna." Crys shrugged. "So?" "So? So what? You want it should sing, too?” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
