Barbara Kingsolver

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

We define ourselves as intelligent. That's odd, because we're doing the definition - We're creating our own definition and saying, 'We are intelligent!'

I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.

I am a big one for subtlety and empathy. My dad was softly spoken and didn't carry his honours and accomplishments for everyone to see.