Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Barbara Kingsolver More Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver More Quotes From Barbara Kingsolver I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch. Barbara Kingsolver sweaters family-and-friends sheep I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night. Barbara Kingsolver awake writing night Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it. Barbara Kingsolver writing long book Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen. Barbara Kingsolver prose verbs roots I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit. Barbara Kingsolver discipline writing night The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say. Barbara Kingsolver In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising. Barbara Kingsolver writing facts thinking If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction. Barbara Kingsolver moon blue giving I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters. Barbara Kingsolver real writing school I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience. Barbara Kingsolver our-world reading thinking I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that. Barbara Kingsolver think me living experience