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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
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More quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

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But the past is long, and the future is short.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve.
Karen Thompson Walker
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Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
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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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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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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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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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.
Karen Thompson Walker
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I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.
Karen Thompson Walker
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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.
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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In general, I think I'm quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.
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'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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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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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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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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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?
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
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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.
Karen Thompson Walker