Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolveris an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 April 1955
CountryUnited States of America
Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.
There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.
I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.