172 Quotes by Jenny Offill

Ben se ha quedado despierto hasta muy tarde afilando los lápices que ha encontrado debajo del sofá. Ha guardado los más bonitos para mí. Me gusta llevarlos en la mochila. Sobre todo, este lápiz rojo que creía que ya no iba a volver.

I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.

I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.

I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.

I think that when we're looking at things when we're right in the center of things, as opposed to being a bit unmoored from what's going on around us, we see things through a kind of dulling lens of convention, and there's something about extreme emotional experiences that gives us a heightened clarity, I think, of thought and of feeling.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.

What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.

Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.