Quote

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Perfection
Necessary
Joy
Spacious
Stop
Playfulness
Place
Desk
Become
Demanding
Self
Desks
Writing
Flexibility

More quotes by Karen Russell

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It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Karen Russell
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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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I'm not going anywhere, she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
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I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.
Karen Russell
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Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.
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I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.
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It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
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I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
Karen Russell
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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
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I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
Karen Russell
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Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.
Karen Russell
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So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
Karen Russell
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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
Karen Russell
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Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
Karen Russell
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I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.
Karen Russell