Latest Lily King Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

  Lily King

  Notebook, Writing, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes. Then when I put it on the computer, a different part of my brain kicks in and I really evaluate every single word and sentence and make decisions. I like that step of polishing while I'm rewriting the entire thing, not just cutting and pasting. Really putting in every word and making a decision: is this something I can stand by?

  Lily King

  Mistake, Cutting, Decision

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things. My first three novels were all about families. Things that happen in a house within a family, because you're a child or because you want to keep the family together, you suffer things you might not have had to suffer if you weren't in that situation.

  Lily King

  Children, People, House

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part.

  Lily King

  Writing, Culture, Hell

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.

  Lily King

  Mistake, Rough Drafts, Want

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

  Lily King

  Hands, Brain, Keyboards

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

  Lily King

  Writing, Editing, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

  Lily King

  Notebook, Writing, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

  Lily King

  Reading, Grandmother, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

  Lily King

  Bats, Delicacy, Tribes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

  Lily King

  Writing, Would Be, Form

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

  Lily King

  Writing, Hell, Novel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

  Lily King

  Writing, Murder Mysteries, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

  Lily King

  Reading, People, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.

  Lily King

  People, Might, Situation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

  Lily King

  Ideas, Intellectual, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

  Lily King

  School, Character, Spain

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

  Lily King

  Country, War, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

  Lily King

  Real, Virginia, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.

  Lily King

  Strong, Childhood, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

  Lily King

  Done, Odd, Situation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

  Lily King

  Writing, Stories, Ends

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

  Lily King

  Childhood, Feelings, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

  Lily King

  Details, Stories, Pages

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.

  Lily King

  People, Situation, Angry

  Source: www.guernicamag.com