33 Quotes by Jennifer Gilmore

I find I have to touch what I am working on every day, or a deep-seated dread kicks in that is very hard to overcome.

People might seem to have a perfectly fine life but inside, we don't even know if they've suffered.

I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.

I think we think that parenthood is confined to the country of mothers, but I think a lot of the men I've spoken to and the men who have read my books - I've been surprised by this actually - have a fierce attachment to being parents and to being fathers. And just as we, a lot of women I know, want this, men too want to pass down what they have to pass down.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

I think publishing's strength is also its weakness. It's got such a rich and celebrated history as an industry. For the most part, publishing people are incredibly creative, business is done based on the strength of relationships, and the product being peddled is books.