Author

I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

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.

From Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson

Notable Quotes

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