Quotes by Lily King - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
Lily King / Novelist
Investigation
Self
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I've also done things that put me in odd situations.
Lily King / Novelist
Done
Odd
Situation
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I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.
Lily King / Novelist
People
Way
Emotionally
Interact
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I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
Lily King / Novelist
Communication
Active
Writing
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I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.
Lily King / Novelist
Details
Pages
Stories
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I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.
Lily King / Novelist
Fiction
People
Reading
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I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
Lily King / Novelist
Might
People
Situation
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Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
Lily King / Novelist
Hell
Novel
Writing
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There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.
Lily King / Novelist
Bats
Delicacy
Tribes
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When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.
Lily King / Novelist
Angry
People
Situation
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I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.
Lily King / Novelist
Ideas
Intellectual
Trying
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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 / Novelist
Childhood
Different
Feelings
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Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?
Lily King / Novelist
Disappoint
Illusion
Initials
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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 / Novelist
Character
School
Spain
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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 / Novelist
Editing
Feelings
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Brain
Hands
Keyboards
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I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.
Lily King / Novelist
Sides
Voice
Yelling
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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 / Novelist
Ends
Stories
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Murder Mysteries
People
Writing
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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 / Novelist
War
Country
School
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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 / Novelist
Form
Would Be
Writing
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Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
Lily King / Novelist
Book
Character
Writing
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There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.
Lily King / Novelist
Thinking
Two
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Language
Real
Virginia
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I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.
Lily King / Novelist
Human Nature
My Family
Three
Adjust
Forth
Observer
Origin
Situations
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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 / Novelist
Grandmother
Reading
Way
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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 / Novelist
Notebook
Naked
School
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Mistake
Rough Drafts
Want
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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 / Novelist
Childhood
Feelings
Strong
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I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.
Lily King / Novelist
Cells
Phones
Thinking
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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 / Novelist
Children
House
People
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You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.
Lily King / Novelist
Communication
Attention
Fall
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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 / Novelist
Culture
Hell
Writing
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I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
Lily King / Novelist
Children
Father
Mother
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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 / Novelist
Cutting
Decision
Mistake
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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 / Novelist
Notebook
Feelings
School
Writing
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