"It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Emily Barton quotes (page 2 of 2)
35 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that."
Read quote
3 likes
"Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on."
Read quote
3 likes
"There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate."
Read quote
3 likes
"[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon."
Read quote
3 likes
"[Michael] Chabon is arguing in favor of what is at the same time an old-fashioned and very forward-thinking opening up - of taking off the class associations with those labels, because we grew up, or I certainly grew up, feeling that, "Oh, there's literary fiction, and beneath that, there's these other things." He's actually saying that they're all of equal merit, and in many cases, that work in the genres, or work that draws from the genres is more entertaining for readers, since it is our job to entertain people."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm not for it [Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron ], I'm not against it, I'm just interested in it and how it functions, but I think that, in some senses, in those two novels, that was difficult for people to see."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems."
Read quote
3 likes
"Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet."
Read quote
3 likes
"Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems."
Read quote
3 likes
"The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people."
Read quote
3 likes
"Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing."
Read quote
3 likes
"A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities."
Read quote
3 likes
"I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future."
Read quote
3 likes