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A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Barbara Kingsolver

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Real School Writing
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Education Order School
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Bread Real
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Literature People
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Discipline Funny Things Writing
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Out Views Work
The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Blow Differences Way
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

might Reality Space
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fallen Tree Trouble
Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cities Firsts Groups
But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Job Mother Running
He needs to go rub his soul against life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Need Rub Soul
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Growing Safe Water
Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Appreciate Family Stranger

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

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A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

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