120 Quotes by Karen Thompson Walker

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day; it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.

I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Nothing has happened to me out of the closet that was anywhere near as dangerous as being closeted.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.