Quotes by Karen Russell

About Karen Russell:

Karen Russell is an American novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2013.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration.

Karen Russell

My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

Karen Russell

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

Karen Russell

I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

Karen Russell

Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.

Karen Russell

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Karen Russell

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

Karen Russell

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

Karen Russell

I think there's a kind of confidence I often feel when I'm writing that I don't feel when I'm in the world, I guess. I feel a different kind of conviction about my choices. I feel much more insecure and awkward in the world, somehow, than I do when I...

Karen Russell

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

Karen Russell

New York is a weird place.

Karen Russell

I'm living two blocks away from this library - and I don't know why I was so elated about this - but I'm in my mesh jogging shorts in the elevator and I saw that my book 'Swamplandia!' was their book club selection. And I was over the moon.

Karen Russell

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

Karen Russell

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

Karen Russell

It can be difficult workshopping novels because any questions or qualms you have as the author can be like, 'That's next chapter, don't worry about it!' I don't think the workshop is set up so well to do that for novels.

Karen Russell

Wait, that’s your idea? That’s your expert advice? You’re going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You’re going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted tha...

Karen Russell

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.

Karen Russell

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

Karen Russell

I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I'm a sucker for humor and strangeness.

Karen Russell

I'd love to meet Flannery O'Connor. I think I'd be content to hear her speak on any subject. What forces shaped her. What nebula of books and stories were whirling together inside her at the time of her death.

Karen Russell

People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being.

Karen Russell

Author Bio

  • NameKaren Russell
  • DescriptionAuthor
  • BornJuly 10, 1981
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Novelist
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program