Antonya Nelson Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I want to earn a reader’s capacity to be moved.

Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.