Karen Joy Fowler Quotations

The smart way to build a literary career is you create an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what they are going to get. That's the smart way to build a career, but not the fun way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That's an option, too.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

Often, when you look at history, at least through the lens that many of us have looked at history - high school and college courses - a lot of the color gets bled out of it. You're left with a time period that does not look as strange and irrational as the time you're actually living through.

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.

My books have occasionally been of mixed success. It's not like I have gone from triumph to triumph. I have had a couple of books do very, very well and a couple do very, very badly.

In certain ways, we, many of us, stopped paying attention to the world. I have to think we would have moved on the whole climate issue in a different way if we'd been paying better attention.

If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

I was pretty happy with how my career had gone, mainly because of the enormous freedom I've had to write what I've wanted to write. I had a very clear picture of who I was as a writer.

I hear so many writers say - and these are writers that I trust completely - 'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing but drink coffee and complain about their lives.

I do read all my work aloud as I'm working - this has made it a little hard to adjust to my husband's retirement. I can shout the shouty parts if I'm alone in the house, but of course, I feel a fool if someone is there to hear me.