Karen Traviss Quotes

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Fear of the unknown is a great creative partner.

I think that we all absolutely have curiosity. It brings about knowledge. It's energizing. It's spiritually empowering. It makes us more interesting as people.

I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.

I'm a thinker and feeler and dreamer and explorer.

I look for stories everywhere.

I always try, if I can, to travel before I start a writing project. For me, travelling is my education. It inspires me, and it clears my mind and allows me to come back with a cleansed palate.

I read a lot of books. I read because it inspires me and shows me paths that I could never imagine. Sometimes those paths are horrible and sad, and sometimes they are hopeful and amazing. Not always are they paths to the future, and sometimes the paths are actually about the past but make sense when applied to the future. Books are amazing.

If you know everything, it keeps you from writing. You don't want a story to burn you out instead of surprising you.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

Dig into life with wild roving abandon, opening your mind to the delicious possibilities that perplex the mind, entice the heart, and excite the spirit.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.