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If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

Karen Russell

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Karen Russell
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: July 10
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Miami
Florida
Weird
Gonna
Thing
Something

More quotes by Karen Russell

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Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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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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No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
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.
Karen Russell
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There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
Karen Russell
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Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Karen Russell
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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.
Karen Russell
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America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
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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When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
Karen Russell
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My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
Karen Russell
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For me, the term literary fiction means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
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.
Karen Russell