Quotes by Antonya Nelson - Page 1

Is not Justice just a nice way to say revenge.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Justice
Nice
Revenge
Copy Quote
I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Reader
Earn
Copy Quote
Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Compelled
Uncertainty
Stems
Copy Quote
I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Comparison
Extremity
Psychological
Forcing
Illuminate
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Attention
Going Away
Pay
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Battle
Efficient
Heart
Illogical
Logical
Messy
Between
Nearly
Enduring
Head
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Advise
Revision
Strongly
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Life
Dog
Moving
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Capable
Groups
Short Story
Celebrating
Insular
Pair
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Kindness
Dizzy
Stars
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Character
Hardship
Taken
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Notes
Work Always Me
Work Me Weird
Craft
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Curious
Uneasy
Fairly
Myself Thinking People
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Groups
Insight
Dramas
Elevate
Frame
Minor
Operate
Short Stories
Smaller
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Simple
Vocabulary
Wall
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Block
Session
Workshops
Beginner
Talks
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Colorado
Hung
Professors
Family People Parents
Family Parents People
Returned
State University
Summers
Copy Quote
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 / Author
American Culture
Capture
Hypocrisy
Imagery
Instance
Modesty
Perversion
Preaching
Absorb
Teenagers
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Isolated
Mexico
New Mexico
Realism
Southern
Starters
Domestic
Generational
Identified
Region
Stylistic
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Real
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Accustomed
Complicated
Reader
Aspects
Inhabiting
Sensibilities
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Sister
Household
Natural
Sibling
Three
Your People Sometimes
Your People Parents
Child
Writer
Became
English
Brothers
Exact
People Sometimes Your
Parents
People Say
Professor
Third
Copy Quote
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 / Author
Canon
Columbia
Columbia University
Faculty
Lit
Thesis
Forties
Master
Faulkner
William
Oversee
Copy Quote
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Commitment
Embrace
Impulse
Ought
Trust Work Your
Draft
Fervently
Hardly
Revise
Copy Quote
I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Constant
Curriculum
Evolution
Links
Life Time Family
Different Stages
Entirely
Life Family Time
Heads
Stages
Whereas
Copy Quote
I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Hesitant
Indulge
Reader
Sentimental
Life Work Sometimes
Labeled
Stretch
Unmoved
Copy Quote
Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.
Antonya Nelson / Author
May
Mind
Writing
Copy Quote
If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance.
Antonya Nelson / Author
Book
Character
Successful
Copy Quote

Related Author Authors

Zig Ziglar
Author
Saturday, Nov 06, 1926
Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012
Wayne Dyer
Author
Friday, May 10, 1940
Saturday, Aug 29, 2015
Stephen Covey
Author
Monday, Oct 24, 1932
Monday, Jul 16, 2012
Zz Packer
Author
Friday, Jan 12, 1973
Zsuzsanna Budapest
Author
Tuesday, Jan 30, 1940
Zona Gale
Author
Wednesday, Aug 26, 1874
Tuesday, Dec 27, 1938
Zoey Dean
Author
Zoe Weil
Author
Thursday, Jul 13, 1961
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Author
Wednesday, May 11, 1927
Wednesday, Oct 08, 2014
Zick Rubin
Author
Zhang Xianliang
Author

Saturday, Sep 27, 2014
Zelda Popkin
Author
Tuesday, Jul 05, 1898
Wednesday, May 25, 1983
Ze'ev Jabotinsky
Author
Monday, Oct 18, 1880
Sunday, Aug 04, 1940
Ze'ev Chafets
Author
Zane Grey
Author
Wednesday, Jan 31, 1872
Monday, Oct 23, 1939

View All Author Quotes

Top Authors

Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Carl Sagan
Astronomer
Friday, Nov 09, 1934
Friday, Dec 20, 1996
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civil Rights Activist
Tuesday, Jan 15, 1929
Thursday, Apr 04, 1968
Robin Williams
Actor
Saturday, Jul 21, 1951
Monday, Aug 11, 2014
Aristotle
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Yogi Berra
Baseball Manager
Tuesday, May 12, 1925
Tuesday, Sep 22, 2015
Winston Churchill
Former Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom
Monday, Nov 30, 1874
Sunday, Jan 24, 1965
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Aldous Huxley
Writer
Thursday, Jul 26, 1894
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
Mahatma Gandhi
Civil Rights Leader
Saturday, Oct 02, 1869
Friday, Jan 30, 1948
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
William Blake
Poet
Monday, Nov 28, 1757
Sunday, Aug 12, 1827
Tyler, The Creator
Rapper
Wednesday, Mar 06, 1991
Zig Ziglar
Author
Saturday, Nov 06, 1926
Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012

View All Authors

Antonya Nelson Quotes - Page 1

App & Tools

Related Author Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Author Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page