Top 24 Antonya Nelson Quotes
#1. Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side - wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.
Antonya Nelson
#3. The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical.
Antonya Nelson
#4. Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.
Antonya Nelson
#5. Our mother had faith in literature the way others had faith in God or America; she put herself in its hands the way patients did their physicians; she prescribed it, she preached it.
Antonya Nelson
#6. I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can't stop until I've found an answer.
Antonya Nelson
#7. My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.
Antonya Nelson
#8. Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.
Antonya Nelson
#9. I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
Antonya Nelson
#10. I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
Antonya Nelson
#12. There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.
Antonya Nelson
#13. I think what I like best is that when people give talks or workshops, it doesn't really matter what level you are as a writer - whether you are a beginner, or you've been around the block a bit; there's something that you can take away from every session.
Antonya Nelson
#14. I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.
Antonya Nelson
#15. Melissa Pritchard's prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance.
Antonya Nelson
#16. I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I've returned every summer since I was born.
Antonya Nelson
#17. I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.
Antonya Nelson
#18. I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.
Antonya Nelson
#19. You own a dog with the knowledge that it will move through the stages of existence in fast forward, providing you with a lesson about your own life passages if you let it.
Antonya Nelson
#20. Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.
Antonya Nelson
#21. Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.
Antonya Nelson
#22. Finding pleasure in revision is the thing I would most strongly advise to people. It's not something I did as a younger writer; I learned it over time.
Antonya Nelson
#23. Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.
Antonya Nelson
#24. I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.
Antonya Nelson
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