A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“Doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone?” — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different -… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer. — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seeing was just age, a gradual shift that I'd failed to register. I sometimes felt the… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share
“She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.” — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination ... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
