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
Stop
Playfulness
Place
Desk
Become
Demanding
Self
Desks
Writing
Flexibility
Perfection
Necessary
Joy
Spacious

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Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
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It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
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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.
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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
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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.
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And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
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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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I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
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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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My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
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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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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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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.
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Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
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Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me.
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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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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
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Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
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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.
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I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
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