Julianna Baggott Quotes - Page 3

I feel too much. It's like being drummed to death from within. You know?

She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.

Basically if you burst into my office the walls themselves will flutter as if alive - maybe that's the reason for all the wings in 'Pure.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

I prefer a cluttered workspace.

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of.

Red Sox fans have been pushed to the brink over the years, but that's how faith grows stronger.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.

I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

Writers aren't born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.

I didn't start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.

Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.

I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.

I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry.

One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.

Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.