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
With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here's a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm… — Karen Thompson Walker Copy Share Image
I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited… — 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
