My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who’ve become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master’s thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn’t find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn’t read Faulkner. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I’ve returned every summer since I was born. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can’t stop until I’ve found an answer. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it’s not impossible to know someone who’s like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
I’m not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn’t stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy – how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
I have three brothers and one sister, and I’m the third child. Sometimes people say, ‘It’s only natural you would become a writer – your parents were English professors.’ But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor. Antonya Nelson Read Quote
