My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
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
It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty. — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway. — 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,… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
“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
