I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them” — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them. — 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
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
I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a… — 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
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of.… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me,… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh,… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see… — 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
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
“A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls… — 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
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
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their… — 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
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
I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the… — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my… — 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
“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
