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How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

Karen Thompson Walker

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Karen Thompson Walker
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More quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

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I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
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An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.
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My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.
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There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
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Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.
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I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.
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But the past is long, and the future is short.
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I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.
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In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
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To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
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As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.
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My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.
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Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
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Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?
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I'm an only child, and I think one of the sweet things about that is that my parents are really interested in every aspect of my life.
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I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.
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I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
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Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.
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Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
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I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.
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