Author

Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud.

Fall into your sentences; enjoy writing them. Love the world you are creating.

Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see, first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling - instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you.

From Karen Bender

When I was 19 and dropped out of college for several months, I lived for some time with my grandmother.

From Karen Bender

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

From Karen Bender

Writing about a person whose struggle you wish you could solve is an act of compassion and also, frankly, opportunism.

From Karen Bender

Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.

From Karen Bender

At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.

From Karen Bender

You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.

From Karen Bender

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.

From Karen Bender

Karen Bender

Notable Quotes

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