Quotes by Lucy Corin - Page 1 | QuoteForever

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

To make a beautiful piece means you have really witnessed it and really made decisions about it.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Beautiful
Decision
Mean
Copy Quote
Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Nests
Scary
Smart
Copy Quote
Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Book
Fatherhood
Parent
Copy Quote
Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
People
Stories
Toss
Copy Quote
You're seeing something that you've seen a thousand times and you just like it. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a revelation. It's not a surprise. It's comfort.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Comfort
Revelations
Surprise
Copy Quote
I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Consumers
Want
Writing
Copy Quote
If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Book
Mean
Writing
Copy Quote
One of the reasons I like to hang out with scholarly types is they can do a broad reach conceptualization of things that is astonishing to me. I'm really good at the particulars but I have to do an immense amount of critical thinking to make something larger of it.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Reason
Thinking
Type
Copy Quote
For a really long time [before writing the novel], I was watching a lot of serial killer movies and I started to wonder if this was a trend and if other people were doing the same thing. That's what happens when you suddenly have a critical perspective on your own behavior.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Long
People
Writing
Copy Quote
I'm a horrible historian. My memory is bad. I read things and then I forget them. I can't understand dates and I can't measure time. Time is confusing to me. That's why I do a lot of manipulations of time in my books, in part because an orderly time is physically difficult for me to conceive of in my brain.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Book
Confusing
Memories
Copy Quote
So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Ideas
Perspective
Views
Copy Quote
The short story is so much about inevitability and this feeling that things always had to be this one way, and I wanted the apocalypses to blow that idea apart. I hope it feels that way. I hope the book invites people to read the stories in order and then, if they feel like it, maybe not read them in order the next time.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Blow
Book
Order
Copy Quote
There were a lot of apocalypses that didn't make it into this assemblage because they didn't suit the world. And defining that world and figuring out what its wobbly borders were was a long-term and exhaustive process. I had all of these different ways of categorizing the apocalypses I had made. I had a period of time where I cut them up.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Cutting
Different
Long
Copy Quote
It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Space
Book
Reading
Copy Quote
Writing a book is about me doing the work to get from the obsessive particular to something that reaches out of that in some meaningful way. It doesn't come easy to me. I really admire people who do it with acuity, but I don't, and for me it takes the process of working on a book for years to do any thinking that I feel accomplishes anything. I don't do it off the cuff well.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Book
Meaningful
Writing
Copy Quote
I think there is something about being described and having your abilities described as something definable. I was diagnosed at about six, when a teacher couldn't understand how I could be a bright girl and yet couldn't read yet. I did that whole backwards letters thing. I used to sit in the same place when I did homework because I remembered that B's went towards the window and D's went away from it.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Girl
Teacher
Thinking
Copy Quote
I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Eight
Writing
Years
Copy Quote
A lot of times when I ask people what their apocalyptic fantasy life is like, they'll immediately say something like, "Oh, what I think is going to kill us is climate change or World War IV," and that's not what I'm interested in at all. The point is not about winning a bet about what's going to happen. The point is about the human action of examining the possibility, the kind of obsessive imagining about it.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
War
Thinking
Winning
Copy Quote
The story, I like to say and remember, is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that are much savvier and more complex than what you could come up with on your own. Find them with your marking pens as they emerge in your drafts. Become a student of your work in progress. Look for what your material is telling you about your material. Every aspect of a story has its own story.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Ideas
Looks
Progress
Copy Quote
You know how some people will say to writers, "Why don't you just write a romance novel that sells a bunch of copies and then you'll have the money to do the kind of writing you want to do"? I always say that I don't have the skills or knowledge to do that. It would be just as hard for me to do that kind of writing as it would be to learn how to do any number of productive careers that I can't manage to make myself do.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Careers
Skills
Writing
Copy Quote
I think we are living in an era of being hyper-concerned about, Is it us? Because we have this historical awareness. People really want to know: will it be us or our kids or our grandkids to live through this? We don't want it to happen, we don't want to be the ones with the poisoned water, but at the same time, I think there is this curiosity, like, Am I one of the "lucky" ones who gets to be here at the end? That's the tension I'm interested in.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Kids
Thinking
Water
Copy Quote
When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Car
Past
Writing
Copy Quote
When you have an authority figure tell you something that distinguishes you, there's a little bit of a badge of courage or pride point that comes with it, and also some relief that the grownups actually have an answer for the problem. But, at the same time, there's suspicion and defensiveness, like, Why is the way I do things a problem? Maybe the way you do things is the problem. All of these things come with the very notion that you've been described.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Answers
Pride
Relief
Copy Quote
I decided to make myself a little less precious with my storytelling. I think you can see from the first three pieces in the book that I have a long term relationship with the short story as a form and I really love an elegantly crafted story that has several elements that come together in a way that is emotionally complex and different from when we started. That kind of crystalline, perfect, idealized thing that the short story as a genre has come to represent.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Book
Perfect
Thinking
Copy Quote
I really like the interplay between thinking of text as ephemeral and thinking of it as a concrete, physical thing. With almost anything that I write, I'll stay completely immersed in the electronic text of it for a period of time and in another period, I'll stay immersed in it as a physical thing that can cut your skin. So with the apocalypses, I had them taped all over the wall and they had codes on them. Sometimes I would color code them in terms of thematic elements, sometimes in terms of voice, sometimes visual forms or images.
Lucy Corin / Novelist
Cutting
Wall
Writing
Copy Quote

Related Novelist Authors

George Orwell
Novelist
Thursday, Jun 25, 1903
Saturday, Jan 21, 1950
Zoran Drvenkar
Novelist
Wednesday, Jul 19, 1967
Zia Haider Rahman
Novelist
Zelda Fitzgerald
Novelist
Tuesday, Jul 24, 1900
Wednesday, Mar 10, 1948
Zakes Mda
Novelist
Zadie Smith
Novelist
Saturday, Oct 25, 1975
Zachary Lazar
Novelist
Yxta Maya Murray
Novelist
Yury Olesha
Novelist
Friday, Mar 03, 1899
Tuesday, May 10, 1960
Yasutaka Tsutsui
Novelist
Monday, Sep 24, 1934
Yasmine Galenorn
Novelist
Xiaolu Guo
Novelist
Wu Cheng'en
Novelist
Wright Morris
Novelist
Thursday, Jan 06, 1910
Saturday, Apr 25, 1998
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
Novelist
Tuesday, May 07, 1867
Saturday, Dec 05, 1925

View All Novelist Quotes

Top Authors

Deepak Chopra
Author
Wednesday, Oct 22, 1947
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli
Historian
Monday, May 03, 1469
Tuesday, Jun 21, 1527
Lucy Larcom
Poet
Friday, Mar 05, 1824
Monday, Apr 17, 1893
Walt Disney
Animator
Thursday, Dec 05, 1901
Thursday, Dec 15, 1966
Dalai Lama
Saturday, Jul 06, 1935
Isaac Newton
Physicist
Sunday, Jan 04, 1643
Monday, Mar 31, 1727
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Charles Spurgeon
Preacher
Thursday, Jun 19, 1834
Sunday, Jan 31, 1892
Kobe Bryant
Basketball Player
Wednesday, Aug 23, 1978
Wayne Dyer
Author
Friday, May 10, 1940
Saturday, Aug 29, 2015
Helen Keller
Author
Sunday, Jun 27, 1880
Saturday, Jun 01, 1968
Henry Ford
Industrialist
Thursday, Jul 30, 1863
Monday, Apr 07, 1947
Chanakya
Teacher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970

View All Authors

Share This Page