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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.

Karen Thompson Walker

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Karen Thompson Walker
Imagine
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More quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.
Karen Thompson Walker
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I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.
Karen Thompson Walker
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An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.
Karen Thompson Walker
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I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.
Karen Thompson Walker
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There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.
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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief.
Karen Thompson Walker
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I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.
Karen Thompson Walker
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In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
Karen Thompson Walker
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But the past is long, and the future is short.
Karen Thompson Walker
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My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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