Lily King quotes

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication. (Lily King)

I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.

Lily King

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.

Lily King

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

Lily King

I always had this put-together family, and I always identified as the outsider. And that's a position where I feel most comfortable, and yet I feel an incredible longing to belong. That is really a strong feeling from my childhood - a desire to be part of a group.

Lily King

It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.

Lily King

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

Lily King

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

Lily King

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

Lily King

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

Lily King

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form. (Lily King)

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

Lily King

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

Lily King

I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.

Lily King

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

Lily King

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

Lily King

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

Lily King

I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

Lily King

You don't realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

Lily King

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation. (Lily King)

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

Lily King

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

Lily King

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

Lily King