Karen Russell Quotes

• 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’m writing.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Awkward, Insecure

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pleasures, Readers

• I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Anthologies, Darker

• I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Florida, Alligators

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

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poems, Remember

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Tried, Favorite

• I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I’m sure I’d love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Joy

  Tags in Weird, Beautiful

• I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Happier, Moved

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

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thirties, Grow

• I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering – they’re sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I’m doing, and all my pleasure’s on the level of the line.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cathedral, Fiction

• I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Somebody, Speak

• I grew up reading a lot of these super weird, genre-bending Southern gothic writers.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Gothic, Weird

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Remarkably, Weird

• I also love animals, and I worked at a veterinary clinic for a while, but it turns out that loving animals and removing deflated basketballs from the intestinal tracts of animals are two very different skill sets.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Skill, Removing

• Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ luck.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Brevity, Shape

• For me, writing is a parenthesis where I can make sense of life.

  Karen Russell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dealings, Fiction

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Block, Grove

Karen Russell (38)

Birth:	10th July, 1981
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 18th December

Births

• 1956 - Ron Dee White
• 1878 - Joseph Stalin
• 1954 - Ray Liotta
• 1835 - Lyman Abbott
• 1950 - Randy Castillo

Deaths

• 1975 - Theodosius Dobzhansky
• 1971 - Robert Tyre Jones Jr.
• 2011 - Vaclav Havel
• 1892 - Richard Owen
• 2008 - W. Mark Felt