The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle. Karen Russell More Quotes by Karen Russell More Quotes From 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 sibling understanding brother When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality. Karen Russell drafting character reality I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard. Karen Russell favorites-things writing trying My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary. Karen Russell vocabulary dumb class 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 symphony writing book I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers. Karen Russell outsiders training felt A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions. Karen Russell picnics generations feelings I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips. Karen Russell immersion students world Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything. Karen Russell madness white book Growing up, Catholic church really was such an incubator for my imagination, because all of those mysteries felt embedded in this insanely green, tropical landscape: the ocean nearby, the giant banyan trees. It all felt part of one seamless mystery to me. Karen Russell growing-up ocean imagination At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful. Karen Russell block names beautiful I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes. Karen Russell views people thinking I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter. Karen Russell hunters black fiction So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. Karen Russell decision book thinking For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication. Karen Russell attention mean fiction If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird. Karen Russell one-thing ifs
