Writer Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

— Barbara Kingsolver

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

— Barbara Kingsolver

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

— Barbara Kingsolver

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

— Barbara Kingsolver

“The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention”

— Barbara Kingsolver

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and…

— Barbara Kingsolver

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit…

— Barbara Kingsolver

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the…

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

— Barbara Kingsolver

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see,…

— Barbara Kingsolver

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of…

— Barbara Kingsolver

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a…

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you…

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

“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

“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

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

— Barbara Kingsolver

“You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

— Barbara Kingsolver

“I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

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