Julianna Baggott Quotes

I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.

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.

People know the difference between good and evil in their hearts-if they search them. Religions twist good and evil. Their differences are the kind that need to be taught because they aren't natural.

If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work - think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans.

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

I don't have a favorite. I need different genres at different times.

The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.

I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it.

Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside, these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels.

Love is selfless, it is a weakness, a giving in, a constant falling.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.

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

I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal.

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.

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

I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly.

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

I'm a writer of faith who worries about the intolerance of religion. I look at the past and fear we haven't learned from it. I believe that humanity is capable of evil as well as great acts of courage and goodness. I have hope. Deep down, I believe in the human spirit, although sometimes that belief is shaken.

When you're in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual

I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.

You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

Writing stories is the habit of lying put to good use.

Sometimes the only way to fix a mistake- is to make it twice.

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

If you look at the world one way, it takes from you - it's a thief of time, energy, creative mojo. But if you look at the world another way, it gives you an endless supply of motivation.

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.

Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.

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

Don't shame the young for releasing their pent-up fear.

You learn to exploit genre for the more important things - to my mind - like story, character, image, language.

Sometimes you meet someone and you know that your life will be different from then on.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

Beauty, you can find it here if you look hard enough.

First, you hand over some basics-overwhelming joy, existential angst, a giving-in to desire, etc. And then you promise to withstand talking idly about the weather, to encourage cliché, to uphold the virtues of average. You hand over the need to be understood and, in return, you get a bar of Normal soap. And you can wash in it and be daily reborn to a safe world of modest, enduring love or, at least, mild, well-mannered bonding.

Memories are like water.

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

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

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.

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

I believe that one of the most damning things about our culture is the adage to never talk religion and politics. Because we don't model this discourse at the dinner table and at Thanksgiving, we don't know how to do it well and we're not teaching our children about the world and about how to discuss it.

Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.

I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.

Our love is our burden.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

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.

No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.