Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

- Barbara Kingsolver

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

- Barbara Kingsolver

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.

- Barbara Kingsolver

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

- Barbara Kingsolver

As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

- Barbara Kingsolver

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

- Barbara Kingsolver

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

- Barbara Kingsolver

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.

- Barbara Kingsolver

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

- Barbara Kingsolver

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

- Barbara Kingsolver